


The Tension and the Spark

by lonelywalker



Category: Dexter (TV)
Genre: AU, Age Difference, F/M, Serial Killers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-30
Updated: 2011-09-30
Packaged: 2017-10-24 04:54:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/259237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the end of S2, Debra leaves for Oregon with Lundy. As they track down a serial killer who seems to be working with a partner, she's forced to examine her own relationship - and where it might be going.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tension and the Spark

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to karlamartinova for the speedy beta.

**1\. Miami**

She’s had the sentence framed in her head for an hour, tongue working its way around each syllable as she sits in the near-dark of her desk and hammers on her keyboard, begging the screen to deliver some solace.

The Bay Harbor Butcher is a cop, or a techie, or a secretary… Whoever it is, from a captain to a cleaner, it’s one of their own, someone they should be able to trust, and someone she _has_ trusted. It’s difficult not to flinch whenever someone passes the door, or comes in to empty the trash. She’s known some of these people for years, but suddenly she’s questioning everyone, everything, even Batista, Masuka, LaGuerta… She’d trusted Rudy with her life, and where had that gotten her?

The only person she doesn’t question is the person she needs to talk to most, who she needs to come out of his office and drag her out from behind her desk. When he does, though, she needs to say it, and she knows she can’t. Half the problem is that it starts with his name, and she’d realized in a moment of horror that she’s never, ever said it. Not even last night when she’d become very intimately acquainted with the taste of his lips.

It’s not exactly difficult. A perfectly ordinary name. But he’s so firmly lodged in her mind as Special Agent Lundy, fuckin’ Special Agent Rockstar, that it’s difficult to cast aside all of the procedure, all of her respect for his position… She hits enter on her keyboard and glares at the screen, a cheap plastic pen almost snapping in her grasp. “ _Frank_.”

"Yes?"

Well, she should have predicted that. Super spy Frank Lundy was probably creeping about behind the Iron Curtain when she was in diapers. Scratch that. About ten years _before_ she was in diapers. When dinosaurs ruled the earth.

He looks tired, threading his tie out from his collar and wrapping it around his hand. There's a hint of unnatural brightness in his eyes, though, caused by a mixture of fluorescent lighting and that terrible tea he drinks. But he could probably stick this out for another night. So could she.

She really, _really_ fucking hopes she doesn't have to.

"I just, you know…" There's no good excuse handy for randomly saying his name to herself in the middle of the damn night. "Wanted to thank you for dinner last night. You're a really good cook. And... I will totally make you some toast sometime. You know, if you want."

One of these days, she's going to have to make up business cards to be used in these sorts of situations. They'll say nothing but _Babbling is a sign of affection_. And, maybe on the other side, _Oh god just fuck me_.

"I make great French toast," he says, as if she's not rambling on like a crazy person at all. He checks his watch and slides his hands into the pockets of his pants. And then: "I'll drive you home."

She's about to point out that she has a car, which she is perfectly able to drive herself, thank you very fucking much. In retrospect, she's so very glad that he stops her before she manages to spoil everything by defaulting to a position of extreme indignation.

 _Assume good faith_ her mother would have said. She’s been pretty bad at that lately.

“Can I, um…” She needs to say it, and the words won’t come. “Can I come home with you? I know what we said, yesterday, about taking things slowly. But… I could take the couch?”

God, she sounds like such a pathetic, vulnerable little _child_ , and she’s been doing her very best _not_ to cast him in the role of father figure.

“Debra,” he says, in that deliberate way he has. “Knowing how beautiful you are, and knowing what a gentleman _I_ am, I don’t think there’s any chance you’ll be taking the couch.”

She kisses him in the darkness of the office, fingers tangling in his hair. It’s not what she’d meant to say, but it’s a start.

* * *

They stop by Dexter’s apartment so she can pick up a toothbrush and a change of clothes for the morning. Frank’s a cautious driver, probably more afraid of getting lost than ending up in an accident, and she does her best to keep her eyes on the road and navigate them safely to his place.

His place. He’s only lived there a couple of weeks, and barely anything there is his. None of the kitchenware, none of the furniture or art on the walls. Perhaps in the bedroom… But what he has must have been brought in a suitcase or two. Enough for clothes. Files. A book or a family photograph.

It’s as much his place as Dexter’s is hers.

“Where’s home for you?” she asks at a stoplight. They’ve been silent since Dexter’s apartment but for directions. There’s 70s folk music on the radio, and she doesn’t trust herself not to babble.

Frank glances over at her. “Home? Well, California originally. DC for most of the last thirty-five years. My daughter’s still out there.”

“You have a daughter?” Of course he does, as if her daddy issues weren’t enough to complicate this relationship. Even if Frank is nothing like her father. _Especially_ if Frank is nothing like her father.

“Mm hm. Doing very well for herself. We… don’t see each other as much as we should. Holidays mostly. Lots of emails.” There’s that glance again. “She’s younger than you are, don’t worry.”

Not that much younger, if she’s living on her own and has been for years. And that suggestion that she might be concerned about his daughter’s age, as if she might be meeting her, as if there might be a future here when they’ve had all of one date that hadn’t gone further than hot, desperate kisses… She's not sure if it's a relief or more pressure than she can take.

Debra leans back in the seat and looks over at him, trying to be dispassionate. She hadn’t exactly been bowled over by him the first few times they’d met. He’s older, early fifties at the very least, receding hairline, wrinkles around his eyes… he fades into the gray of his suit when he’s not speaking, when she can’t hear that wry humor or see the brilliance in his eyes.

He’d seen right through her, though. More than he could ever have read in her file.

It feels oddly illicit, getting out of his car in the parking lot of his apartment building, slinging her bag over her shoulder. This isn’t a sweet date, coming home tipsy and excited after a night on the town. This has purpose, even if she can try to convince herself it’s only about not being alone and freaking out.

Lundy - _Frank_ \- had begged her to take things slowly over their dinner the previous evening. She’d have fucked him right then and there, and she fucking _knew_ he wanted to. But he knows her history, and he’d told her his. Some things shouldn’t be fixed by jumping into bed with some guy, or some girl. Some things can’t even be fixed by an evening alone with Chopin.

“There’s leftovers,” he says to her in the elevator, and turns to give her a sheepish smile. “I so rarely get to cook for company. May have gone a little overboard last night.”

“Well it’s not like we ate much.”

She can see him thinking it over too, about how good the food had been, how it had perfectly complemented the wine… and how much neither of them had really cared after awkward small talk had tumbled into awkward flirting, and then a kiss that wouldn’t have been able to pick awkward out of a lineup.

And it _should_ have been awkward, for fuck’s sake, with the age difference, with their jobs, with everything. But she’s been longing for him on some level ever since he talked her into staying on his task force, and out of her months of depression and self-doubt. First for his approval, then for his friendship, and then, her heart pounding in her chest as she knocked on his door, just for him. All of him.

But he’d held onto reality longer than she could, rousing himself from that heady aroma of passion and insisting that they finish making dinner. So she’d peeled potatoes, flushed with warmth and desire, approving of his cologne and wondering if she’d managed to get him hard yet.

“Have you… I mean…” She’d sat with him on the couch as the steaks cooked, his arm around her as jazz played and she utterly failed to appreciate it. Thinking about his cock had just led onto thinking about how different this was from the simplicity of fucking Gabriel, or even Rudy, which led onto more things that were so not sexy it wasn’t even funny. Death. Cancer. Wondering if Frank had watched his wife wither away in hospital on the end of a morphine drip, wondering if it had been quick, if that would have been better than the way she’d lost her mom.

Frank had looked at her with such interest, gently stroking away a lock of hair from her forehead, that she’d just had to spit it out. “You know, since your wife?”

He doesn’t wear a wedding ring, but it’s been two years, and he’s been on dates. Possibly terrible dates, but dates nonetheless. And he’s a good-looking man, clever, kind. She’s almost afraid to scratch the surface and find him weighed down by more sadness than she could bear.

He had bit his lip, smiled, and leaned forward to pick up his glass. “Yes. With a friend. Not something I’d recommend.”

Deb had assumed the conversation was over then, as he drank in the scent of the wine, his eyes closing. But he’d relaxed back into the couch, turning to look at her. “Honestly, I would have been better off picking up a stranger. At the gym, maybe.”

She had grinned. She just had to. “Not this time.”

“No,” Frank had said. “Not this time.”

In the elevator, now, she slides her hand into his, squeezing. But he turns as the doors open, kissing her with the same need she’d felt last night, desire pushing away troubled thoughts of the past. Tonight, in their work clothes, outside the warmth and reassuring scents of the kitchen, it should be even stranger. But Deb just jams her foot between the doors and kisses him back, not like he’s her boss, not like he’s Gabriel, but like he’s…

“Debra.” He pulls away, and she can see in his eyes that it’s no rejection at all, just self-preservation. Probably something about not wanting to leave DNA evidence all over the elevator.

The doors try to close on her foot and jerk back with a clunk of irritation as she looks at him looking at her: pupils blown, breathing ragged, torn between lingering fear and a desperate need.

“Frank,” she says, all of her thoughts finally clear, the despair and conflict of the evening falling away. “Make love to me.”

He smiles, maybe at that fucking cheesy phrasing, maybe at the sentiment, maybe because he’s just so damn relieved, and then he’s kissing her again, sweeping her up in his arms like she’s some fairytale princess before the doors can jam closed on her foot again.

“Jesus fuck,” she breathes, embarrassed to all hell but liking it anyway, fingers in his graying blond hair, laughing against his lips as he fumbles for his keys. “Prince fucking Charming.”

Inside his darkened apartment, she almost wants him to fall to the floor with her, kick the door closed and fuck her full of him on the gray carpet, hard and burning. She just needs the way he feels real, a solid thing in an impermanent life. But he carries her to the bedroom and she tries not to giggle like a schoolgirl as he lays her down on the bed with its gray duvet and she drags him down with her, pushing his jacket back off his shoulders.

“Debra, honey… shh, wait…” He reaches over and switches on the lamp by the bed, picking up his jacket, stashing away her bag. She’d wonder if he was nervous if it wasn’t for that feel of his body hot against hers, that whispered endearment, _honey_ , that warms her as she unbuttons her shirt, waits for him.

He smiles down at her, haloed in yellow light. “Go easy on me, Officer Morgan.”

“Hey, you know I’m the good cop.”

He was her age once, she thinks as she looks at him. Crew-cut hair and less wisdom in his eyes, but the same smile that lights up the room as he toes off his shoes and moves onto the bed to kiss her again, pressing her back against the duvet, a hand parting her shirt and smoothing its way up her stomach. She wants to take control, flip him onto his back and push the breath out of him with her body. But that’s not what he wants, and not what she needs either.

“Frank,” she says as he kisses her throat and she tugs his shirt out of his pants, needing to feel him just as much as she’s eager to see what might be left of Frank Lundy when all of his FBI armor is stripped away. “Frank.” His name feels easier on her lips now, as if she’s beginning to get to know him.

He sits up, just a little, enough to unbutton his shirt and pull the undershirt over his head. For some reason – his military bearing, his intelligence background, fifteen years in the Bureau – she’d expected scars. But her fingers move over smooth skin, absorbing his warmth.

“Fuck, you’re beautiful.”

And he laughs.

Getting undressed, Deb decides, is fucking _hard_ if you decide to actually care about things like buttons and clasps and zippers. If you’re not going for some kind of world record. She’s no good at holding back, terrified that there just won’t be time, that the phone will ring, that the passion will die out like a flickering candle, that her brain will finally catch up with the burning need between her legs and demand to know just what the fuck she’s doing.

But every time she’s about to lose it, bucking up her hips under his, grabbing for his belt, he only takes things even slower until she relaxes and closes her eyes and lets him in – tender kisses that aren’t exactly what she’s used to, and the lithe strength of his body that promises more, and better.

His fingers play over the material of her bra as though he’s considering something, and for a moment she’s worried he might actually _ask permission_ before he does what she’s been wanting to do for what seems like hours and rolls over, pulling her on top of him and deftly unhooking the bra. “You’re beautiful,” he corrects, his hands cupping her breasts as he arches up to kiss her again, her hair falling between them. And now, finally, she knows she’s got him hard. More than hard.

She has to wonder what it would take to make Frank Lundy lose control.

“What happened with your friend?” Deb asks, one hand pressed against the length of him, the other unbuckling his belt.

The light shines in his eyes. “It was awkward. It was always going to be awkward.”

“And now?”

“Now is different.” He lifts up to let her pull down his pants, and his shorts with them. “I don’t really know why, or how, but…”

Now _is_ different. For a moment she wants to fight the sudden impulse to just _look_ at him, naked and golden in the light, but she drops his clothes to the floor and strips off her pants too, watching him watching her. It should be horribly awkward, a familiar pink blush over her body, an anxiety driving her to either fuck him raw in ten minutes flat or be out of the door in ten seconds. This isn’t easy the way it had been with Rudy, because he had never been real, or the way it had been with Gabriel, because he had never really mattered. This is fucking _hard_ , but hard in a way that just might turn out to be glorious.

“Hey,” she says, lying down beside him, truly calm for the first time all night.

He smiles back. “Hey.”

Frank makes love to her with a slowness that has nothing to do with age or anxiety and everything to do with making the moment last. Tomorrow they’ll have to deal with the Bay Harbor Butcher again, but for now Deb’s body feels so full with arousal and contentment and sheer fucking happiness that there’s just no space for anything else.

“I need you,” she whispers as he pushes inside her. He’s made her so slick with need ever since they got here that he just _fits_ there, moving with an easy slide that just continues this slow yet insistent way he has of building her pleasure, making her moan with desperation as well as satisfaction.

“You have me,” Frank tells her, his voice oddly clear despite their gasping breaths. She thinks maybe he adds _always_ , but then they seem to have reached even Frank’s limits for taking things slowly, his strokes harder and faster as she wraps her legs around his hips, willing him deeper .

“ _Debra_ ,” he says. It’s almost as if there’s a hint of panic in his voice, and she knows exactly what it is he’s feeling, the intensity of the pleasure they’re giving each other paired with the emotional impact that’s seemingly come out of nowhere. They didn’t just pick up strangers, and any awkwardness disappeared the first time he kissed her.

Deb slides her hand down between them, feeling the hard, rocking motion of him as she fingers her clit, swollen and hot already and just needing a little more… She can feel herself tighten around him, feel his hardness inside her, and it’s all so much more than enough. "Oh god, holy _fuck_."

"Morgan…" She can feel him smiling against her jaw as she squeezes her eyes shut, body vibrating with the sheer pleasure of him. Whatever there might be about him that's so damn arousing, she knows she'll never want to let it go.

"Morgan, do you ever stop swearing?"

She pushes up into him, finding his lips. "Invite me over more often and maybe you'll find out."

He should come now, hammer into her with overpowering need, but instead he takes things even slower than he had in the first place. It had been almost unbearable _then_ , and now…

Deb moans as he kisses her throat. It’s an unfamiliar concept, actually being able to pause and catch her breath and – worst of all – to _think_ while she’s in bed with a guy. Pretty much everything she’d liked about Gabriel was how everything was about raw passion that made blood rush in her ears, blocking out everything but sex and heat and the intensity of the moment.

And this, now, with Frank… She’s beginning to discover a different kind of intensity, one that would be utterly fucking terrifying if it wasn’t him here with her, moving over her with a steady rhythm that shouldn’t be anywhere near fast or hard enough, but soon she’s biting her lip to keep from crying out at the strange, comforting pleasure of it.

She should say something to break the silence, but nothing comes to mind that’s any better than how weirdly wonderful it is to hear him breathing, to feel the moment even he just can’t take it anymore and tightens his arms around her, fucking her with a need she can finally recognize.

He doesn’t say anything, his eyes wide and locked on hers as he spills out inside her, his breath stopped dead for a second as if time, too, has halted.

But then he drops to the mattress beside her, eyes closed, smiling like he’s just seen choirs of angels. “ _Fuck_ ,” he says with laughter in his voice, and reaches to tug her close to him again.

Her usual modus operandi might involve one of any number of excuses, picking up clothes from the floor, maybe stealing a five-minute shower before sneaking off back to Dexter’s… but tonight is about new patterns for both of them. About not being alone.

“What are we going to do tomorrow?” she asks later, in the darkness, her hand running over his hip and down his thigh. In the last couple of days he might have moved from being her boss to her boyfriend (boyfriend? really?), but there’s still some deliciously illicit thrill in feeling his body naked against hers.

“Mm… I have some ideas…”

She nudges him. “I mean about the _case_.” The Bay Harbor Butcher. One of their own. Someone they might see every day. Someone who could tamper with evidence, watch them, even _hurt_ …

Frank kisses her forehead, and all of those thoughts, the twisting fears in her gut, go away. “These things come together. They always do. Trust me. I’m pretty good at this sort of thing.”

Deb breathes out. Breathes in. Thinks about what might’ve happened if Frank had been called in to tackle the Ice Truck Killer. Breathes out again.

Tomorrow, things might be scary again, but for now at least she feels safe. And that sort of feeling has been beyond her wildest dreams for months.

In the morning, sunlight falling across crumpled sheets, they make love again, tired and happy, work so very, very far away.

Debra leans forward on his chest, feeling the rise and fall of each breath. “Your left eye’s a little darker than your right eye,” she says. It’s all the incisive investigating she really wants to do.

* * *

  
Everything should be harder than it is with Frank. She’d made a list that first day at work, almost convincing herself that, despite how much she liked him, despite how much fun they’d had in bed, it could never work. What would people think? How could she possibly be with a guy thirty years her senior? Was it all just some stupid unresolved daddy issues? But one smile from him, one stolen elevator kiss, and she’d decided she just didn’t care.

The other problems are far more practical: the fact that, one day, very soon if they do their jobs right, he’ll be gone. She’d pushed him away when confronted by that very idea, as if reality was determined to break her heart when she’d barely managed to patch all the pieces back together. But he’d confessed his own insecurities, and they’d decided to take things a day at a time and worry about long-distance relationships when the time came.

Remembering not to worry has hardly ever been one of her strong points, but work keeps her running, and on the nights she spends with him – more and more as time goes on – she’s too busy to care.

There’s just something absolutely arousing about driving him crazy, about making the gray-suited FBI agent lose control and reveal the mischievous boy within. She climbs onto his lap and fucks him in the middle of _White Heat_ on TCM. She gets him hard while he’s teaching her to make a soufflé, pushes him into bed when he absolutely refuses to get bodily fluids over his kitchen, and takes him into her mouth before he can say another word in protest.

She’s not going to say “I love you”, and she’s pretty sure he won’t either, not with the specter of his wife’s memory in photographs hanging over them, not with the lingering worries she knows he has about their age difference and when, exactly, she’s going to leave him. But there’s more love in the little things with him than there had ever been with Rudy, whether it’s making her scream his name just by using his tongue, or simply wrapping his arms around her in the fluorescent glow of a late-night supermarket.

 _A truly beautiful relationship_ , she thinks, and wonders how they’ll ever manage to let each other go.

Frank likes his routines. Some of the army has never really washed off him, and it must be necessary when he spends the entire year living out of a suitcase, being shunted from city to city by the Bureau. Deb’s been through his laundry and found nothing more casual than some sweatpants and a ragged UCLA t-shirt. “Used to go running,” he explains, making eggs for them both in the morning. “Never have the time for it anymore, and in this heat?”

She’d take him to the mall if either of them ever had the time. In the mornings, after kissing and lazy consideration of whether they really have time for sex, he lets her take the shower while he cooks breakfast. Then he showers while she does her best to eat the huge portions he normally makes. She’d be happy just with low-fat yogurt. But everything he makes tastes so damn _good_ , and there’s probably something to be said for eating real old-fashioned food once in a while…

The water is far too hot on her face, and just perfect after five seconds, gently easing her out of the cozy relaxation of a night snug between blankets and Frank and into the harsh realities of the day. Her toothbrush is on the sink, but she uses his soap and shampoo. Screw people at work if she doesn’t smell suitably feminine. It’s something pretty neutral like “ocean spray” anyway, and…

There’s movement on the other side of the shower curtain. A shadow. Her mind is just going to that horror movie place when Frank peels back the curtain with a finger. He’s naked, hair still sticking up from their night in bed together. Goddamn fucking adorable.

“We’re out of eggs,” he says – apology, explanation, whatever – and he steps in beside her, closing his eyes as he ducks his head under the water, searching out her lips with his mouth and fingertips.

He can’t see her up close, he’d mentioned once. One of the many problems of age. It means he wears glasses to read, means he has trouble detecting the tiniest expressions in her eyes when they’re together. No one else would even realize, but he’s built an entire career, an entire lifestyle, on understanding the most minute facets of personalities.

“I’m not a serial killer,” she’d laughed, smoothing her thumbs over his eyelids, watching him smile.

“If you were I’d care less.”

Of all the things she’d thought she might do with Frank Lundy, shower sex had been pretty low on the list… But since she’d kissed him, and especially since he had kissed her, throwing all her ideas about father figures and sweetly formal dinners out with all her hang-ups about Gabriel and Rudy, she’s had to invent an entirely new list. A list that focuses pretty damn heavily on how perfectly he manages to drive her crazy.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she says breathlessly, mouth all over his wet skin, shoulders back against the cold tile as she wishes this tub wasn’t quite so soapy and slippery and approaching being a fucking death trap.

“Probably should’ve done this in bed,” he agrees with that familiarly rational tone that’s completely undone by the way he’s smirking.

And when he’s like this, body pressed against her, his left hand moving over her breasts as if he’s appreciating every inch of her, learning it by heart, she simply can’t think of anything else except rubbing against him, finding his cock and pumping it until he’s so goddamn hot and hard in her hand and she feels so warm and wet and desperate to be fucked that she can barely believe that they were actually going to have _breakfast_ instead of doing this.

It's easy to forget about his age when they're like this, when only the good things count. He might have been married to the same woman for about as long as she's been alive, but that doesn't exactly mean he's been a monk. Holy fuck no.

"I like your body," she finds herself murmuring against his shoulder as her hands trail down his back, squeezing his ass, pulling him into her. She likes it even if the pills on the bathroom counter scare her a little. Blood pressure. Cholesterol. He's not in bad shape at all for a guy his age, and she'd sworn she wasn't going to be the one having hang-ups about the age difference, but... Little by little, the realities of the two of them outside glorious sex and the thrill of the hunt might just pile up into something she can't ignore.

"You'd better," he says, his arms around her as he slides her up the wall with a grunt of effort. Fifty pounds. Yeah right. But her grin of self-satisfaction turns into something more as he eases inside her, her legs curling around his hips as he fucks into her with none of the slowness or tentative manner of their usual morning lovemaking sessions. This isn't exactly somewhere she'd want him to go slow, either, and there's something wonderful about just being _taken_ , and not by some giant brute of a man, but by one of the few men she's ever met who could pass for a gentleman.

She nips at his lip as he kisses her, half-hoping she'll leave a bruise. Fuck it. She wants him. Wants to devour him. And if that means making up some lie about sparring (or just smirking her way through it), then that's what they'll do.

Her orgasm comes just as she feels him tense with his own climax. "Oh Jesus, Frank!"

For a moment the blood thundering in her ears, mingled with his cries of release, completely overpowers her senses, so it takes her a second to realize that even the FBI's federally mandated hot water has finally given up on them.

"Holy fucking fuck!" Gorgeous man or not, she's out of that bathtub in two seconds flat, grabbing the towel.

Frank chuckles, moving to wash his hair in what she's amazed aren't actual icicles. "See what you can find for breakfast. I'll be out in a minute."

The only reason she doesn't say "I love you" is because she isn't used to it. But the sentiment wells up in her throat anyway, and she turns, furiously toweling her hair dry, feeling the ache of him still inside her.

God fucking _Lundy_.

Everything is far too easy with him, which is what, she knows, will make it all far more difficult in the end.

* * *

"Debra?"

All police officers are called upon to make split-second decisions. To chase one man or another, to make an arrest or let something go, to shoot or not. Good police officers make the right decisions more often than they fuck up. Debra Morgan thinks of herself as a pretty damn good police officer, but the decisions she's forced to make must have been handed down from some fucking circle of hell.

She makes the choice to go with Frank without needing to think about it. It's the kind of decision she shouldn't need to think about. He's leaving, and she… if she doesn't love him, she's pretty fucking close, and at the worst it's a couple of weeks of great sex in a new city.

She makes the decision to help Dexter after thinking about it for an exhaustingly long time, caught between duty and desire, and hates herself for it afterward. He's her _brother_ even if she wasn't a cop, even if she hadn't sworn to uphold the law and protect and serve. God fucking _dammit_.

At Lila's apartment, while Dex gets checked out for smoke inhalation, she stares at her phone, willing it to explode.

Just like Gabriel, Frank's done absolutely nothing wrong, but she's furious at him. Furious that he's tearing her apart like this, that he's making her choose in a situation where every option is the wrong one.

He must be at the airport now. Maybe he's even on his flight. If she just waits here and breathes and does nothing, in a few minutes he'll be gone, and he'll think – he'll _know_ \- that she's chosen her job over him. Maybe he'll even be relieved. Frank Lundy will be gone from her life just as quickly as he'd entered it, and everything will be back to normal.

She waits. She breathes.

 _Fuck_ normal.

Frank shows up thirty minutes later without a jacket or a tie, gym bag over his shoulder, looking like he's run all the way from the boarding lounge. "Debra?" There's nothing but concern in his eyes as he wraps her in his arms. "Are you all right?"

"Mm fine," she mutters into his shirt. All their eminently logical reasons for not being together seem to melt away just by having him here, the warmth and smell and feel of him. Even if the other cops and crime scene techs must be whispering and casting a few glances their way. She can be a damn girly girl who missed her boyfriend for a minute if she fucking well wants. "Sorry you missed your flight."

He grins. "No you're not. How's Dexter? The kids?"

"Dexter's a fucking _idiot_ ," she declares, loud enough for him to hear. "But they're okay. There's an APB out for Lila… Fucking vampire _bitch_." In one hour she could've lost Dex as well as Lundy. One hour. But now they're both here, alive, to stay.

Well… perhaps not to stay. "You have to go."

"Not today," Frank says softly, his hand running down her arm. "My luggage went on without me. I can catch the next one tomorrow… If you can give me a place to sleep tonight."

They sit on her bed, surrounded by boxes and dust, and eat pizza and swig beer from the bottle while they watch sitcoms that require no prior knowledge or even coherent thought. It's the most ridiculously normal thing she's done in weeks. Frank strips off his shirt and shoes, and says it's the most ridiculously normal thing he's done in _years_.

Perhaps nothing has changed. He’ll still be leaving in the morning, bags packed, convincing her to stay with those sad eyes of his that tell her one of them has to be the adult and it sure as hell isn’t going to be her. But at least she goes to sleep with him for one more night, drifts off with her cheek against his chest. It’s the first time they’ve ever slept together without sleeping together, and if she’d had time to think about it she might have assumed it was marking the end of them as lovers, the start of them as distant friends who communicate with Christmas cards and Facebook statuses.

“Come with me,” Frank says in the morning.

If he’d said it in the haze of last night she wouldn’t have believed it, would have blamed it on the adrenaline and the warm beer and the pepperoni pizza. But he looks serious and scared as he gazes at her, stroking hair back from her face, and she knows he won’t ask again.

 

 **2\. Portland**

It seems easier to breathe when she steps off the airplane, bag over her shoulder, laptop case in her hand. There’s something like a twenty degree difference between Miami and Portland, with wind whipping up scraps of paper on the tarmac, but it’s not that. It’s the firmness of the ground beneath her feet, and the idea that she’s here, she’s arrived, and the decision has been made. For the next two weeks, at least, she’s free from work and family obligations, and also free to figure out where the fuck her life might be going.

For now, though, it mostly involves following Frank. He’s never been here before either, but he has an amazing ability to always look like he knows where he’s going. Eight-hour flight regardless, he looks perfectly neat and formal, tie straight, jacket smooth, briefcase by his side. Deb wants to reach up and muss his hair just before a young guy in a suit steps out in front of them. “Special Agent Lundy?”

Frank shakes his hand, polite and warm, the very first moments of that famous diplomatic charm. "Yes... This is Officer Debra Morgan from the Miami PD. Just helped me crack the Bay Harbor Butcher case. She'll be assisting us for a few weeks."

"Hope it won't take that long, sir."

Deb has her hopes too, mostly involving a quick arrest and then a week or so to themselves, maybe fishing, maybe on a beach, maybe just holed up any goddamn place as long as it has a fridge and a bed. But she's been a cop for too long, and both the serial killer cases she's worked have been tortuous in their complexity. Better lay in for the long haul.

The apartment the Bureau have assigned them is smaller than the one in Miami, and Frank unpacks with almost military precision, humming under his breath as he plugs in his laptop, hangs up his suits, and checks out the kitchen.

"There's no food," Deb calls from where she's crashed on the couch, her bag small enough that it'll be no problem to unpack later – or live out of for a couple of weeks.

Frank checks the burners on the stove. "With those skills, I'm constantly amazed you haven't made detective yet. There's a grocery store a block over. We can get all the yogurt you can eat. Even if that's no way to plan a nutritionally-balanced diet."

"I'm not planning anything." She slips off her shoes and rubs the toes. What was it – something she'd read about feet swelling up on flights? Well, it feels good anyway.

She pads over to the kitchen, where Frank is checking his email, planting her chin on his shoulder.

"You have the strangest Google Alerts in the _world_."

It's barely an exaggeration. Who else searches news articles for "bludgeoning"? Dexter, maybe. She really should've set the two of them up on a playdate where they could spatter the walls with cherry juice.

She wraps her arms around his waist, thinking about unzipping his fly and slipping a hand inside, but not quite summoning up the energy to do it. "You really want me to help with the case?"

"Debra, you were invaluable in the Butcher investigation. Your insight, your determination, your ability to keep me from going _completely_ insane…"

"Yeah right. You're the sanest person I've ever met."

"Who hasn't had a day off in two years…" Frank scratches his head. "I mean it. You're not just a pretty face, Debra."

"Flatterer." She goes to check the fridge again, just in case some food has miraculously appeared. "You can just bring me in on a case like this? They're going to know we're fucking."

"You've got the experience."

"Cause I was engaged to a serial killer and worked with another one?"

"Exactly. You're a living wacko magnet. My entire plan is to have you stand out in the street and see who shows up." Frank shuts down his laptop. "I'm taking you out to dinner."

Deb eyes him. "Dinner? Really real dinner?" It's not that his cooking isn't to die for, but there's something about having her gorgeous older lover taking her out to a restaurant… even if it's likely to be some cheap local place… what the fuck do they eat in Portland anyway?

"Really real dinner," he assures her. "They may even have napkins."

They do have napkins. And wine. And very good lamb chops. As well as Frank's FBI files spread out over the table like menu cards. Fortunately, in the early evening on a week night, there are few other patrons, and the waitress decides to stay well away from them after she's delivered their orders.

Debra studies the autopsy photographs, chin in hand, thinking of her days in Vice. All the victims are male prostitutes. White. Some confirmed to be youthful runaways from rural homes, others city boys. All of them left like ragdolls, draped over fire escapes, bound by colorful, intricate rope. Stab wounds like... "Penetration. This isn't like the Butcher at all. This is about sex."

"Oh, it's not about sex." Frank wipes his glasses with the corner of his napkin. "I agree that's what it looks like… But really this is an act of control. Or imagined control. Complete domination of the victim, and complete self-control in terms of tying these knots… Field office is trying to track down the make of the ropes now, by the way."

"Self-control." Deb swaps photographs. Looking at the depth of the stab wounds, it's hard to believe that there was any control about this at all. "Still nothing like the Butcher, though. Or the Ice Truck Killer."

"Well, the Butcher was certainly obsessively neat. Tidy. Careful. One would have to be in order to rack up that many kills." Frank sighs. "Maybe I've worked too many of these cases. The obvious profile would be a white male, late thirties, early forties I'd imagine. Repressed homosexuality. Immense disgust and a certain envy for these boys..."

"But?"

He pours her more wine. "You know, I wasn't right about the Butcher. Doakes put up many red flags for any number of reasons, and he certainly wasn't a well-balanced individual, but I never seriously thought he was that kind of killer until the evidence started to mount up."

She pats his hand. "At least you figured it out before he saran-wrapped you to a table."

"My gut feeling? For what it's worth. I think we might have to consider the possibility that our killer has a partner."

There's something exciting about the idea of solving murder cases over dinner, before they've even seriously started work on the case. But then there's a sense that perhaps she's becoming too accustomed to autopsies with her steak.

Deb takes a breath and focuses on what he's just said. "Our killer has a partner? Two killers?"

"Mm." But Frank's taking off his glasses, gathering the photos back into the file. "I think we'll have to wait until tomorrow for my gut feeling to explain itself, however."

"And find the right music?"

"A duet, perhaps," Frank says, and clinks his glass against hers.

* * *

Doodling on her notepad in the Portland FBI office, she has to wonder how many people have ever tried to profile the profiler. It’s not something she should be doing. No. It’s not something she should _have_ to be doing. She trusts him. She does. It should all be like that time he met his wife and was never scared for even a moment, even though the future brought separation and cancer and tears. She should just _know_.

So she doesn’t go through his email. She doesn’t even go through his sock drawer. But she studies the photographs he’s put up on the dresser of his wife and daughter. She watches him as he directs his team. She Googles him.

He’s written two books, she discovers. One is on Google Books, from back in the early 90s. It’s not exactly a rip-roaring tale. More like a dry-as-dust textbook for up and coming field agents. But the occasional culinary references make her smile. It has a dedication, to Connie and Ellie. His beautiful wife and tiny daughter. Ghosts of the past.

The other book should be more personal. She clicks through the few pages she can access on Amazon, and knows even from those that he’s been holding back. The stories are of real cases, with more of a flair for the dramatic. But it isn’t just about holding back information for legal reasons. She could read every word a hundred times and never guess at the wit and brilliance and passion of the man.

“When you say you were a spy,” she begins over Chinese food from cardboard cartons while Frank is staring at the whiteboard, pen in his hand.

Sometimes she has to wonder if Frank knows exactly where a conversation is going to end up from the very first word.

“Mm?” He starts writing, left-handed, awkward on the board.

“Do you mean… undercover work? Pretending to be someone else?” She’s done it before, for very short periods. Never as a career choice.

He glances over his shoulder. “More or less.”

This is a path of questioning she probably shouldn’t be following, but she’s a cop, dammit, and anything he did must’ve been about thirty years ago. Who cares what was secret back then? “For a long time?”

“Depends what you mean by ‘long’.” He’s written MEETING POINT, and is staring at it as though the words might shift and change before his eyes into some sort of solution.

“Maybe I mean ‘being really fucking evasive’.”

His hands slip into his pockets and he turns, smile as wide as it’s ever been. “Now, do you really think I’d still be alive today if I weren’t?”

She points at him with chopsticks. “Your food’s getting cold.”

“The forensics team is really doing an excellent job,” Frank tells her as he sits down and examines the different cartons, chopsticks in his right hand – she should ask him about that. “The crime scenes are absolutely filthy, of course, but in terms of tracking down fingerprints, fibers… I doubt they need any help. So here we are, playing mind games…”

“You think it doesn’t help?”

He swallows a mouthful of noodles and soybeans before answering. “I think you never can tell.”

Their eyes meet, and Frank leans back in his chair, cracking his back, loosening his tie. “I’ve done this for… probably too many years. It’s the successful cases that make the news, that make people think I’m some kind of savant. And, yes, I’m good at this. Better than most. But there are still plenty of times I’ve pored over files and found the music and profiled hard enough to make my eyes bleed… and the guy’s been busted by some beat cop for a parking violation, or just dropped off the radar. Probably dead or in prison for something that has nothing to do with being a killer. And honestly? I hope for that. I hope to be irrelevant. Let it end quickly and quietly rather than drag on for months just to let me have my moment of glory.”

She has to wonder if he was never like this during the Butcher case because he didn’t know her enough to open up, or because he simply didn’t feel this way. “Okay, but for now they’re still out there. So eat your goddamn noodles and tell me what the fuck the meeting place is.”

“Sir yes sir,” he salutes with his chopsticks, smiles, and goes back to poking at cartons. “You ever run into a couple for the first time? It’s inevitable that, even if you don’t ask, they’ll tell you where they met. A party, an office romance… So what about our killers, if indeed there are two of them. Where do you meet someone with both the ability to kill and the even more crucial ability to keep quiet about it?”

Deb shrugs. “The military?”

“No. Well, yes, but not these two.”

“What’re they going to do? Put a fucking ad on Craigslist?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised, these days.”

“Okay. Fuck. Gun clubs? Kink clubs? Gun _and_ kink clubs?”

"Much as I'd love an excuse to go to either one with you, Officer Morgan, I'm not…" Frank sighs and gets up to get a drink. "You know, I'd almost go for the obvious, except for the extreme violence involved."

"The obvious?"

His phone rings, buzzing and dancing on the table before he can grab it. "Lundy."

Deb swallows her chicken and starts to clean up. She shouldn't eavesdrop, not even when it's probably case-related. He must have _some_ personal calls, after all. His daughter, even though he's mentioned her little enough to make her wonder how good their relationship really is these days. Ex-girlfriends? Probably not, unless he's kept in touch with women from his college days. Casual friends? He moves around too much to keep them, unless they're in the same line of work.

She'd sigh and declare him as socially hopeless as Dexter if she weren't in pretty much the same situation.

By the time he hangs up, she's scraping noodles into the trash, and he's already putting on his jacket. "We gotta go."

She likes that "we" there, finally. "What's up?"

"Forensics tracked down the make of rope, came up with lists of buyers. Turns out it's mostly bought for institutional use around here."

"Did we miss the Portland Institute of Kinky Gunplay?"

"Close. The Columbia River Correctional Institute. Minimum security. Might be the solution to all my gut's rumblings…"

Deb straightens up. "And they're buying rope why? Seems a bit retro."

"Does, doesn't it? I'm sure there's a perfectly innocent explanation, but honestly I'm itching for a field trip. Wonderful scenery around these parts... Can't stand being stuck in the office."

"It's nighttime," she points out, even if she does like seeing him like this – enthusiastic to chase up on even a hint of a lead. "And maybe you'd be better off going on your own. I don't have jurisdiction here."

Frank raps his fingertips against the badge on his belt. "I have jurisdiction everywhere. One of the perks, like being able to do an _amazing_ number of sit-ups in a minute. Join the Bureau, astound your friends…"

He's already out the door.

Deb grabs her jacket and a handful of files, and runs after him.

* * *

The next morning, he's running after her in the cool air of the early hours as they do laps in one of the parks on their way to work. There's a gym in the FBI building, some treadmills and free weights, but Frank had mentioned wanting to get some fresh air. If there's any fresh air to be had in the city.

"Now isn't this better than the Miami heat?" he asks her, doing his very best not to appear out of breath as she ducks her head down to the water fountain.

"If you can take my cold toes all night."

"This is Oregon, honey. It's not exactly the Arctic."

Frank takes his turn at the water fountain as she stretches, taking in the scenery of early-morning dog walkers and other joggers. Still too early for moms and dads and nannies with pushchairs. The kind of time people always seem to be discovering bodies in cop shows.

Deb checks her watch, wondering if the local PD will have any crime scenes for them to look at today, and then wondering which she should hope for – fresh evidence, or no new victims.

"Ready to go?"

She can't quite tell if Frank is genuinely an eager runner, if a little out of practice, or if it's all an effort to not appear to be a doddering old guy. Still, they press on.

"I thought we'd have had a call by now. The Feds are supposed to have it easy, tracking down suspects."

"Only certain kinds of suspects," Frank corrects, adjusting his baseball cap. "Terrorists are fairly hot now. Not a localized killer only preying on the underclass. Have him kidnap a middle class blonde girl and we'll really start to worry."

"It's fucked up," Deb mutters, increasing the pace even though she'd thought she'd make it easy for him.

The prison administration had been reasonably quick to help them out, finding a list of inmates who could have had access to the rope. Cross-referencing that with other aspects of the case, including a violent past and incidents involving sex workers had narrowed it down some. Finding one who had skipped out on his parole officer had given them someone to chase. She'd just assumed that the resources of the FBI would make finding him a lot easier than their painstaking method of knocking on doors in Miami.

"It's politics. Which is also the reason I'm not my boss."

"That asshole."

Frank glances at her, just a flicker of movement at the corner of her eye. "And one of the reasons I'll be retiring soon."

Her feet have stopped moving before her brain has fully registered what he's said.

"You're _retiring_?"

A jogger almost thumps right into her, brushing only her shoulder at the last second before tearing off among the trees. Frank has stopped a few feet ahead.

"Not by choice," he says, as if that's the issue behind her question, behind the shock that's stopped her in her tracks. "I'll be fifty-eight in a couple of months. Mandatory retirement age. They've mentioned a teaching position, but I don't..." His voice trails off as his eyes catch hers. "Debra, what is it?"

"What _is_ it?" She hasn't blown up at anyone in days, feels unnaturally calm when it's just her and Frank, and now she feels like an explosion is well overdue. "You _knew_ about this! I spent weeks wondering where this fuckin' relationship was going, how we could deal with a long-distance relationship with you _constantly_ leaving to go be a goddamn hero... And you _knew_."

Frank reaches out to her. "Debra, I knew about retiring. I had no idea what effect that might have on us. I didn't want to pressure you. Or make you feel like you were trapped."

"Trapped? What the _fuck_?" She slaps his hand away.

"So that day you were upset about me leaving, when we'd been seeing each other for, what, four days, you wouldn't have felt remotely awkward about me telling you I was going to retire and move to Florida to be with you?"

Put like that, it does sound a little stalkerific. She hates his fucking logic.

If they were in Miami she'd just charge off, sprinting to her car and then losing herself in the interminable corridors of the police department. Here it's a little harder to disappear when she's on his turf, living in his apartment, going to work in his office.

She could just grab her stuff and buy a ticket back home, of course… but the moment she takes to consider all of this is also the moment it takes for her to realize it would be stupid to go anywhere.

"I think it would've been sweet," she says, staring at her fingers until she can gather the courage to look up at him. "But that's just all my fucking issues again, isn't it?"

He smiles. That same goddamn smile. "I love your fucking issues," he tells her, enveloping her in his arms as she hugs him tightly. This is so much better than running away. Even if he does stink of fresh Lundy sweat.

"So what are we going to do?" she asks his t-shirt.

This is one question for which he really doesn't seem to have an instant answer. "I don't want to be standing around on your last night here, arguing about whether we can make this work."

She remembers. Diaries. Red-eye flights. Or maybe just asking him to move his entire life to Miami for her. _Just_. As if that wasn't practically proposing marriage and maybe having three kids while they were at it.

"Can we make this work?"

He kisses her hair. "I hope so. I don't want to lose you, Debra."

She doesn't want to lose him either. Whatever it takes.

* * *

The solution to everything, according to her body, is to call in sick and go home and screw. Instead they go to work and shower in separate locker rooms, getting dressed into sedate clothes and catching up on the night's activity.

She used to be impressed by his calm professionalism and the way precious little ever seemed to faze him. Now he seems the same, immaculate in his suit, going over files and exchanging brief, precise conversations with his agents. But she can see some of what lies beneath that now: the exuberance of the boy, and the pain of the man.

"How're we doing?" she asks.

The other agents disperse almost immediately. She feels out of place here, in the Bureau, and none of them seem to know what to make of her. Maybe bringing her along has dented their respect for Frank as well. Honestly, who brings their twentysomething fuckbuddy to work?

Frank closes his file and offers her some tea. "We're doing well. Jones and Petersen are bringing in our guy. Or someone they think is our guy. No ID on him, and he won't volunteer any information. But we'll fingerprint him soon enough."

"Oh. Which ones are Jones and Petersen?" She grabs coffee instead.

"Probably the white guys in suits." Frank shrugs. "Been a little preoccupied this time around. Haven't quite managed to match names to faces."

Deb sits down, thinking about adding a heap of sugar to the coffee. How late might they have to work tonight? "You knew me right away."

"You've got me. I have an excellent head for the names and faces of pretty girls."

His fingertips brush hers as she's reaching for a sugar packet, and she's just clasped his hand when another agent pokes her head around the doorway to tell them that their suspect has arrived. Fuck 'em. She proved her worth as a cop long before she ever met Frank Lundy. Dating a serial killer aside.

The suspect is just as she'd imagined him. Todd Kravitz, twenty-eight, big without being fat, dumb without being a loudmouth. Frank's gut instinct, as he's explained it to her and the rest of his team, was of two men working together - Kravitz the muscle, the blunt instrument, and another unknown suspect the brains, the clean-up man intent on keeping anyone from ever discovering them. That would explain the mixed messages of the crime scene, even if only one killer would be a fear neater resolution.

Debra watches Frank watch Kravitz through the two-way mirror and then looks herself, trying to imagine what she should be thinking, what she should be looking for.

“How much of what you do is just guesswork?” she had asked Frank once, frustrated, confused.

He’d looked at her the way he’s looking at the suspect now, and shrugged. “I wish I knew.”

When he goes into the interview room, though, there’s not even a hint of doubt in his bearing. Maybe the suit helps, as well as the file in his hand. Even she would seem intimidating dressed like that, particularly to an ex-con who understands what it means and probably doesn’t even look past the shirt and tie, or the badge clipped to Frank’s belt.

“Todd…” Frank glances up at him. “I see you’ve been doing quite well since your time in Columbia River. Your parole officer… well, I can’t imagine he really ever gives _glowing_ reports about anyone, but yours isn’t too bad. Apartment. Job. Haven’t been hanging around any known criminals. Very commendable. Which makes it all the more mysterious why we had such a hard time finding you.”

Kravitz is frowning at him, maybe wondering what ‘commendable’ means.

“Where were you, Todd?”

“Where they found me. Duh.”

Frank leans back in his chair, the very picture of someone who has all day to kill. “By the side of a highway, hitching rides without any ID? I can understand the need to get away, but taking the Greyhound might be a little less suspicious.”

“Forgot my wallet. That a crime? I know my rights.”

“Uh huh. I’m a big supporter of rehabilitation for minor offenses, Todd. And honestly I don’t want to book you for anything. It seems you’re doing so well, getting back on your feet. Making a little money. Bettering yourself.”

The frown isn’t going away. “Yeah, so?”

“The problem I have is that my colleagues here can connect you to a series of crimes in the city. Male prostitutes."

"Fags? I don't go anywhere near those guys."

"Well you can't tell, can you?" Frank leans back in his chair, deliberately casual. "Especially these days. Almost every man under fifty dresses the same way. Same hair. Same jewelry. And they're everywhere. Right next to decent, civilized people."

Todd opens his mouth to say something, lifting a hand to shake a finger, and then, abruptly, the movement stops. His mouth closes.

Deb's gaze goes to Frank, watching him, trying to figure out what she'd do. He waits.

"I'm not a hater," Todd says finally. "I mean, whatever. Just don't shove my face in it."

"Did someone shove your face in it? Make you see something you never wanted to even imagine?" Frank's voice is calm, lilting, encouraging a positive answer. "No one could blame you for reacting. It's practically self defense."

Todd swallows and Deb can almost see the memories playing through his mind, the hint of fear beginning to rise in his blood. She's seen it before, a suspect just about to crack, to spill his guts for the slightest chance he might be able to walk out of here a free man, or at least with some kind of deal. Sometimes it doesn't even take anything at all to push them over the edge. Sometimes just a reassuring smile, or maybe the threat of yet more evidence stacked against them. Guys like this, they just want to talk. Let it all out.

But Todd Kravitz just glances at the mirror, takes a breath, and purses his lips closed. The next thing he does say, before Frank has a chance to switch tactics, isn't even close to an admission of guilt:

"I want a lawyer."

"We don't need a confession," Jones (or maybe Petersen) says once they're in Frank's temporary office again, looking at the murder board. "We're running his prints, matching the ropes. It'll all come back."

Frank says nothing, eyes once again on the autopsy photos. Deb wants to nudge him and make him speak, but instead she jumps in herself: "Right, we don't need a confession to get _him_. If anything matches it'll be with him. But what about his partner? We don't have any leads on him, and probably no evidence from the scene. He's the smart one, remember? Probably the reason why Kravitz is asking for a fucking lawyer instead of signing his confession right now."

She hopes the way they're looking at her is because she's Frank's girlfriend, not because she's talking nonsense.

"You're right," Petersen points out. "There's no evidence there's a partner at all. No offense, sir, but..."

"None taken." Frank closes the manila file and sweeps the glasses from his face. "I know how eager we all are to get convictions, and taking Kravitz off the street is a big achievement. Thank you all. So we will put him at the scene of the crime and we'll have an airtight case against him. But in the old days, we didn't have the luxury of DNA evidence. It's not the be all and end all, Petersen. The science might tell us one thing, but human behavior never lies. You really think that if Kravitz did this alone he'd have evaded us until now?"

Muttering. Deb glances around and decides that, but for Frank's reputation, the answer is probably 'yes'.

"So we'll run the tests. We'll talk to him. But we'll also keep an open mind. At worst we'll spend a little more time on this than on all the jaywalkers out there. But at best we'll have another killer off the streets."

Frank talks a good game, but as his agents wander off to strengthen the case against Kravitz, she can't help but be reminded of LaGuerta, insisting that Doakes was innocent even as every single piece of evidence, even his own corpse, pointed towards his guilt. The case, as far as the Portland agents are concerned, should be closed. They should be celebrating victory rather than finding yet another frustrating villain to chase.

She sits up on the edge of the desk and scours the board with him, looking for hints of evidence and inspiration. Something in her wants to touch his arm and tell him that maybe, just maybe, he's wrong. Maybe they should ditch this city and spend a week screwing by a frozen lake.

"Fuckers," she says instead. "What do they know?"

* * *

It’s the smell that wakes her: smoke and chocolate on the cool night air. Frank’s gone from the bed beside her, his place on the mattress not even warm anymore. The bedside clock reads 2am. Deb lies back and stares at the ceiling. Perhaps this is one of those times she should leave well enough alone. Frank Lundy’s lived his entire life without needing her. Maybe this is one of those things he needs to work out by himself, even if it means baking in the wee hours of the morning.

She swings her legs out of bed and grabs his shirt up from the floor, rubbing sleep from her eyes as she goes to him.

The oven in the apartment’s tiny kitchen space is lit up, timer ticking down, sink piled high with brown-smeared bowls and utensils. Frank’s lying out on the couch in nothing more than his boxer shorts, feet hanging out over one arm. He’s stolen her iPod, and he’s either asleep or just listening to it, eyes closed.

Deb resists the impulse to tickle his toes and commends herself for her maturity.

She snaps the elastic of his waistband instead.

Frank might not have the rock-hard, chiseled abs he probably had when he signed up for the Bureau in his thirties, but they’re more than good enough to let him jackknife up and grab her wrist before he’s even really got his eyes open.

They stare at each other, the sound of Chopin a faint buzz between them.

“…hi,” Frank says, and releases her wrist, tugging out an earphone. “Sorry, did I wake you?”

“You’re baking,” Deb points out instead, throwing a leg over him so she can straddle his hips, pushing him back down against the couch cushions. “At 2am.”

“Well, I…”

“Where did you even get the ingredients?”

Frank looks up at her, letting out a breath that might just be ragged with desire. Or guilt. “When we went shopping. Couldn’t just let you buy yogurt, and you never know when you’re going to need the basics. Milk. Flour. Eggs.”

“Chocolate?”

“I’m living with a woman. Of course I need chocolate.”

She jabs him in the ribs, grinning. “So what is it? Brownies?”

“Naturally.”

“You, Frank Lundy, FBI profiler, had a sudden, desperate craving for brownies at 2am?”

He’s running his hands down her sides, cool and smooth, pressing her down into him. “Well, it was more like 1am. I couldn’t sleep. Needed to think. And then I needed fuel for thinking. I’ve always found it easier to concentrate by doing a mundane task rather than doing nothing. So I found a recipe online, set up some Chopin, and… here I am.”

“Here you are.”

As sexy as she finds him in the suit, doing his thing, it’s always a relief to realize that he’s just as gorgeous without it. No authority or father figure, just her man, almost naked, pinned between her thighs.

She leans in, nuzzling his shoulder, breathing deep. “Mm, smells good. How long?”

“Maybe another ten minutes,” Frank says, hand in her hair. “Want them crisp on top, just a little gooey inside.”

“ _God_ you know just how to turn me on.”

His murmured laughter by her ear, arm around her body, almost makes up for him not being there when she’d woken up. His hand pushes up underneath the shirt, warm on her back. “You look better in that than I ever did.”

“Look better out of it too.”

"Don't doubt that."

Even though they haven't known each other for so very long, even though they're in an unfamiliar city, there's something about him that always makes her relax. Rudy had never made her genuinely _afraid_ (prior to trying to kill her, anyway), but he'd made her nervous with his too-perfect exterior. Frank... Frank's made her nervous too, but being with him here like this, watching him deftly undoing shirt buttons one by one, it all seems right. Super spy or not.

"Debra…" He pushes the shirt apart, cradling her breast in his hand as she pulls down his shorts, just needing him inside her, filling her up with pressure and maybe just a little hurt he can kiss away later, chocolate aroma in the air.

Her nipples stroked to hardness by his thumbs, she moves forward, catching hold of his erection so she can guide him inside. She's not really wet enough yet, but there's no way in hell she's breaking this skin-on-skin contact for a second, and all it takes is for Frank to lift his hips as she presses down, and… " _Oh_. Fuck _me_."

"Sorry," Frank says softly, fingertips sliding down her side, and she just has to kiss him for that. Big stupid Zen master.

There's no danger of Frank's brownies burning. She needs him too badly for it to take too long, and he makes none of his usual protests about taking things slowly, perhaps because she's making him feel too good, perhaps just because she's got him pinned to the couch and he’s well aware he has no say in the matter.

She rides him hard, hands making vivid red marks on his shoulders, breaths coming faster and harsher than she'd like. Should've given up smoking earlier, maybe, but she'd prefer to blame it all on him. Besides, he probably can't hear her over the nocturne playing from her iPod. Probably doesn't need to, the way she's moving against him, needing him to respond to her with just as much force and energy, and he doesn't disappoint, pushing up into her _hard_ when she's so slick and open that she can take it all.

"God, fuck, _please_..." She might be begging her own body rather than Frank, but it's all melded together in one wonderful instant, Frank kissing her as she comes, gasping her name against sweat-damp skin when he joins her.

"You are so much better than chocolate," she finds herself mumbling, cradled in his arms and too tired to move.

At least until the timer on the oven starts ringing.

"So what were you thinking about?" she asks as he experimentally pokes a brownie with a toothpick. Naked baking. She could really get into cooking if it goes like this.

She needs to get him a chef's hat for Christmas, though.

"Thinking?" He breaks off a piece and feeds it to her. Really is gooey in the middle. She should probably be worrying about salmonella poisoning or, fuck that, a sugar overdose.

"Your 2am – sorry, _1_ am – insomnia and sudden desire for brownies. Unless you have a stash of pot someplace."

Frank gives her half a smile. "Want some coffee?"

" _Coffee_ coffee?" She wants to pull a 'who are you, and what have you done with my boyfriend?', but Frank isn't just anyone, and changes of behavior with him are probably no laughing matter. "Okay, what's up?"

Frank fills the kettle and switches it on, leaning back against the kitchen worksurface. "I shouldn't have dragged you out here. It was wrong, and I'm sorry."

If she were standing in a kitchen in the middle of the night with any other man, that would sound a whole fucking lot like the beginning of a breakup speech, even if she does still have the scent of him all over her.

Deb bites down on her automatic reaction, which would involve a whole lot of yelling, jumping to conclusions, and possibly throwing the whole plate of brownies in his face. She takes a brownie instead, almost burning her lips. "I wanted to come, remember? I wanted to be with you."

"I know. But after a few weeks in Miami? We didn't really know each other."

 _Breathe, Deb._ "What the _fuck_ , Frank?" At least she isn't throwing anything. Yet. "That's why I'm here. So we can give this a chance."

He shakes his head, rubbing away tiredness from his eyes. "No, you just knew Lundy, Special Agent Rockstar. I _know_ how appealing that is, Debra. Power. Influence. How _exciting_ it is. But what if I'm not him anymore? What if I'm wrong about all of this? I was wrong about the Bay Harbor Butcher. Badly wrong. And what's worse is I don't even know _how_ I was wrong."

Deb finishes eating her brownie with a chocolate-laced grin. It really _is_ nice when someone other than her is being unspeakably dumb about relationships. Fuck, after Dexter and Angel fell for Lila, she's probably the uncrowned queen of dating in Miami Metro.

"You said yourself: human behavior doesn't lie."

"No? Doakes was a dangerous man, I'll give anyone that. Trained by the special forces. Impulsive. Aggressive. Problems with authority. I have no problem seeing him as a killer, but not as _that_ killer. The Bay Harbor Butcher was obsessively clean, covering his tracks, only murdering people who were murderers themselves. Doakes simply didn't have that kind of self-control. He attacked your brother in front of ten cops, for god's sake! And did almost anything he could to piss me off. And then there are the blood slides. They fit perfectly with the Butcher's MO, but not with Doakes at all."

Deb picks up a brownie and goes to feed it to him. "Which all makes perfect sense, except for the _evidence_."

"I know. The tools. The blood slides in his car. The corpses in the Everglades. The very fact Doakes went on the run in the first place. I've seen circumstantial cases, but truly the evidence in this case was overwhelming. Thanks."

"So you move on. These guys are _psychos_ , you know. You think your guys at Quantico have it all figured out?"

"Well it's worked pretty well for me so far." Frank sighs and eats his brownie like a good little special agent. "And I tried to move on, but this case presents exactly the same problem. I'm sure we can take Kravitz down. There'll be evidence. Even if the DNA and fingerprints don't get us results, it shouldn't be too hard to build a circumstantial case. And I'm not convinced he'll stay silent forever, especially if he realizes his beloved partner is probably halfway across the country by now."

"But we can't get the partner."

"Like the boys at the field office said: there's no evidence for it except human behavior, and my track record on that hasn't been so good lately. I'm approaching retirement, and this isn't the first case where I've insisted on there being a serial killer no one else could even see. All of our bosses just want the case closed."

The kettle begins to whistle. "And you think that's why I shouldn't have come? Because I might see that you're not some kind of case-solving superhero?"

He meets her eyes, and not for the first time she wishes she was as good as he is when it comes to seeing right through people. "I think you might realize that a life with me isn't what you want, if there's a chance I might actually be around all the time, if you understand I'm only getting older, if I'm not a special agent, just some guy who hangs around your apartment cooking and completely failing to get pop culture references."

"Oh, you are so fucking hot when you're insecure," she says in reply, grinning as she kisses him. "And, seriously, make me enough brownies and I'm yours for life."

He kisses her back easily enough, but he's still tense when she hugs him. "Debra," he says softly by her ear. "We can't joke about this forever."

She makes them both coffee with all the seriousness she can muster. Looks like it's going to be a long day.

* * *

Even though they get to the office early after a morning run where Debra is chased after by a fluffy golden retriever longing to make new friends, and Frank is mostly lost in his own thoughts, his desk is already stacked high with notes and files.

"DNA matching is going to take a few days," he tells her, going through them from the top. "But at least we have confirmed Kravitz' identity. We've got him on parole violation if nothing else, and the rope very definitely _is_ a match. Search of his apartment came up with some fibers, some blood. They're running that now too."

"So we just wait?" In Miami she'd have six new cases already sitting on her desk, demanding her attention. Or at least a metric fuckton of paperwork to get through. Here she only has this one case, and it's not even hers.

"Or take another run at Kravitz. See if he'll break after a night in the cells. He's been to prison, but believe me there are places worse than Columbia River."

There's a rap on the door. "Phone call for you, sir. Deputy Director Adams from DC."

"Put it through."

Nothing can be said that's more important than the look that passes between them before Frank picks up the receiver. "Lundy."

Maybe she should leave the room, but it's her case too, and she has a feeling he just might need some moral support. When it comes to Adams, the ever-confident Frank Lundy has a tendency to bow his head and start muttering about what a failure he is.

From what she hears on Frank's end of the line, it's nothing unusual: a lot of aborted arguments, and 'yes, sir's through gritted teeth. Two minutes and Frank's hanging up and sitting down at his desk.

Silence.

He picks up the receiver again and dials through to another office. "Jones? Call the lab and see how they're doing. We need to wrap this up tightly as soon as possible."

And then he just sits and looks at her, a faint smile on his lips that never comes close to reaching his eyes. "So I'm a God, am I?"

"You know you are."

His response might be laughter or a groan, but he suddenly looks exhausted, and probably not simply as a result of spending the night screwing on the couch or eating way too many brownies. "I'm to leave for DC tomorrow. Complete all the paperwork here, fill out my retirement forms, and take a vacation."

She just stares. "They _fired_ you?"

"The Deputy Director believes I've done more than my fair share in the past few years, to the extent that I'm making people worry about my... stability."

"Jesus Christ."

"Mm. They like cleared cases. They don't like it when their lead profiler insists on pulling new killers out of thin air. So I have a few months of paid vacation, and then I'm officially retired. It was going to happen soon enough anyway."

"I don't fucking _believe_ this!" Deb stares at the phone as if seriously contemplating pummeling it. "You're the best they have, and they're just _throwing_ you away."

"Debra…" He gets up from his chair, hands on her shoulders to calm her down. The last time he did that, he was trying to convince her why she should give up on him. It doesn't exactly inspire good feelings. "You don't need to be mad about this. I'm fine. I really am."

"Well you _shouldn't_ be fucking fine! You should be anything but fine! Fucking sue them for age discrimination! You love your job, Frank. You can't let them take this away from you."

He hugs her close, damn fucking calm and reasonable as ever. "Yes, I love my job. But not as much as I… want to do other things with my life. See my daughter. Take care of business at home. Travel for reasons other than visiting every morgue in all 50 states."

"Sounds like giving in to me," she mutters into his chest.

"Maybe. But I've been thinking about this for a while. What disturbs me most is I'm _convinced_ there's a killer out there – two killers, actually – and without me they'll never get caught. No one's even going to realize they exist."

She pulls away enough that she can speak and hear clearly. "Wait, _two_ killers?"

"Only one we need to worry about today. We need to wrap up the paperwork and make damn sure we have Kravitz… and then take another run at him and hope he cracks."

"And you're still convinced there actually _is_ another killer?" Early-morning brownies had left her a little confused, but if it's a choice between Portland being filled with crazies and Frank losing it, she knows which one she has to pick. Even if Frank being on the ball means she has to start thinking about Doakes and the Butcher, and how maybe there are more crazies in Miami than she'd ever imagined.

"I have to be. Better safe than sorry, Officer Morgan. They taught me that in special agent school."

Deb smiles. "Bet you were top of the class. But, really, you're okay with this?"

"I have to be," he says again. "But Debra, I meant what I said about bringing you here. You can't tell me you're not better off in Miami, working on making detective, building a life for yourself..."

"And who says you're not part of that life?"

A sigh. "Debra, do you really see us together a year from now? Two years?"

"And you don't?" She grips the lapels of his jacket, as if she can shake some sense into him. It would be so easy for them to break it off now, for him to get on one plane and her on another. But then what had this week in Oregon meant? It can't have just been a way for her to get over him by realizing he's only some old guy who's losing it. He's still _Frank_ , sweet and smart and funny in that infuriating way where she can hardly tell if he actually means it.

"I do," he tells her, looking at her the way he had on the bench by the water when she'd been spilling out her soul to him, the way he had when he'd asked her to come with him to Portland. Like a little boy contemplating jumping into a ravine. "But I see all the things that can go wrong as well, and... Debra, I honestly never thought I'd feel this way about someone again. And when I thought that I was alone, it was okay because it meant I'd never lose someone like that again. Now I don't think there's any risk you're going to die on me, I mean who would dare shoot you? But there are a _lot_ of good-looking young guys in Miami, guys you can have a family with, grow old with… Guys with exciting jobs and flashy cars and _hair_ …"

She _tugs_ on his jacket and pulls him into a kiss, as passionate and needy as he'd been that night in his kitchen. "Let's say it's a perfect fucking world, Frank," she says when he's barely had a chance to get his breath back. "Do you want me to come with you to DC?"

"I want you to come with me everywhere," he says, and she might not be a profiler, but it's the only truly honest thing she can remember him ever saying to her about how he might actually _feel_ under all his dumb rational concerns.

The rest of the day goes too quickly. Results from tests come in, checking boxes on neat little forms, making the case against Kravitz ever more bulletproof. Frank reads reports, analyzes photographs, and takes another run at the suspect himself, but there's no luck. Kravitz has a lawyer and refuses to talk. It's his right, but Deb is amazed he’s actually using it. So many guys like that try to get out of a bad situation through bravado alone.

She expects they'll be sticking it out through the night, chugging down tea or Red Bull and eating something heavily dosed with MSG while they try to find the one piece of evidence that will _make_ Frank's boss listen.

But, come six, Frank closes the last file and throws down his pen. "C'mon, Morgan. Let's go."

If he's giving up, at least he's giving up with style. They find a mall and he lets her interpret jeans labels for him while buying some new clothes that, while not exactly hip, at least aren't gray suits.

"Wow, you actually have an ass," Deb points out, a little extra loudly for the benefit of the sales assistant who kept referring to Frank as her 'father'. "Who knew?"

"I'm not sure they're supposed to be this tight," Frank murmurs, not exactly complaining as he slips an arm around her waist.

"Right, because the last time you bought jeans it was the Great Depression."

"Something like that. I need to cut back on the cream cheese."

They have sushi at a restaurant and watch the crowds go by. Ordinary people, in suits, t-shirts and jeans. Some with bandages, a couple with the bulges of guns at the waistline. One of them could be a killer. More than one. But Frank's let it go, and she has to as well. The Feds are good at this sort of thing. Killers are very good at getting caught. Some of them even _want_ to get caught, to end their inner torment - or just boast about their successes to the cops.

She really wouldn't mind if someone flung himself to their feet and confessed right now.

But if Frank's right about Kravitz having a partner, someone smarter and more cautious, someone who had been meticulous enough not to get caught… The chances are Kravitz will never tell. That would be the entire point of choosing Kravitz. Not because of his strength, or any hatred he might have towards rent boys, but because of his devotion. LaGuerta had totally fucked up the Bay Harbor Butcher case trying to protect Doakes, her friend. And would she give up Frank in the same sort of situation?

Frank, who's still half a mystery.

"Can I ask you something?" she says, stealing some of his wasabi.

"Anything for a pretty lady."

She takes a breath, studying him briefly. If there's a time to back out… "You told me your wife thought you were a spy when you met…?"

Frank smiles into his glass of water. "Mm. I don't know about 'thought'. She was pretty insistent that she _knew_. Still, it wasn't too hard to tell. I was this young kid, fresh out of the army. Looked about twelve if I recall. In Vietnam they'd realized I could be quite useful in certain areas, so when I came back I did some government work here and there. My boss decided I should attend a very big, flashy social event in DC. Partly as security, partly just to get acquainted with some of our foreign dignitaries. It was the first time I'd ever worn a tuxedo. Talk about a sore thumb."

"Can't imagine you out of a suit."

"I'm out of a suit now."

"Yeah, and it's freaking me out. So what happened?"

"Connie was very much the opposite of me. Her father was quite wealthy. Very influential in political circles at that time, so she was frequently a guest at these events. He said it was to help her build up a network of other young ladies who might help each other out in the future. I'm sure it was more about finding an eligible bachelor. So I'm standing around, utterly lost, and this absolutely _stunning_ young woman taps me on the shoulder… she honestly looked like a fairytale princess."

"Fuck. And I tripped over your briefcase."

"And looked absolutely adorable doing it. So Connie tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'You're one of the spies, aren't you?' I had some incredibly unbelievable excuse and cover story, which I'm sure she didn't even listen to. She said if I was a real spy I wouldn't be allowed to dance, so I'd have to dance with her to prove I wasn't a spy. Which would prove that I really was." Frank may be looking at her, but his gaze is a million miles away. For a moment, at least, until he focuses on her again, shakes his head, and finishes his drink. "You two would've gotten along like a house on fire."

"Yeah, multiple 911 calls. So what did you do?"

"Oh, I never pass up the chance to dance with a beautiful woman. Even if her father was deeply disappointed in her and I ended up pulling the graveyard shift for the next four weeks." Frank smiles, more genuinely this time, and much more in the present. "You'll meet my daughter if you come with me. Ellie. Helen. She grew up somewhere along the way. Got all serious and idealistic, much like I was before the war. All her boyfriends have dreadlocks and smell very heavily of patchouli."

Deb giggles into her chopsticks. "You want me to come?"

"I'm not sure I have a choice."

"You really need to stop fucking dancing around the issue and just _tell_ me. Say what you mean."

"I don't want you to get hurt," he says, low and insistent. "I don't want either of us to get hurt."

"Then why did you dance with her all those years ago?" Deb asks, tone just as urgent. "Why did you ever ask me to dinner or kiss me or ask me to come with you? You're a regular fuckin' daredevil, Frank Lundy. So just take the damn risk. I could get my head blown off any day, and I..."

But he's kissing her then, mouth full of sharp flavors, fingers light on her cheek as she thinks for a moment 'fuck this is _public_ ' and then closes her eyes. He just tastes good and sweet and _here_.

"Come to DC with me," he says, and the fear is gone from his eyes. "We'll work this out. I promise."

Still no red eye flights in her diary, still nothing approaching a future beyond another week of travel and paperwork… But she grabs his hand, throws cash on the counter, and pulls him away. "C'mon, Lundy. Let's go find a dancehall."

* * *

 **3\. Washington DC**

The FBI building in Washington DC is somehow smaller than she’d imagined from all the glimpses in films and TV series, and infinitely less exciting. Even with Frank vouching for her – and perhaps _especially_ with Frank vouching for her – she spends half an hour at the front desk filling out forms while the security officer makes phone calls and stares right through her.

When she’d first met Frank, Special Agent Rockstar, she’d imagined that he must have an office like a Wall Street bigshot, vast and spacious, decorated with sculptures and bonsai trees, looking out over endless manicured lawns. She’d known that the reality had to be different, but not _this_ different.

The corridors are narrow and brightly lit by fluorescent bulbs. No one challenges them, but no one stops to say hello either. Not even a flicker of recognition.

“I’m not here much,” Frank says to an unasked question as they stop by his door. At least his name is on it.

The door unlocks with a swipe of his card, but opening it is a bigger problem. Frank shoves it open by an inch or two, mutters something, and then reaches around to push an object out of the way. “Be careful. It’s not exactly tidy.”

It’s not like him at all. Not like the office she’d imagined – small, dark, old – but nothing like his personality either. Frank switches on the light and she can see that the place is absolutely _filled_ with files, charts… a map on the wall with flags linked by string, autopsy photos tacked to the back of the door. It’s as if he’d been in the middle of a profiling whirlwind and then suddenly left.

Frank takes it all in with a silent nod, closes the door and, coughing on the dust, goes to pry open the window. “Like I said. It’s been a while.”

“How much of a while?” Deb looks at the files on the desk, the computer monitor caked in dust, a family photograph much the same.

“Well…” Frank begins to pick up the file folders and rearrange them on the shelves. “Connie was sick… I took some time off for all the tests, the treatments. Ellie… _Helen_ just couldn’t deal with it all on her own, and I didn’t want her to. And then…” He takes a breath and coughs again.

“Then there were arrangements to be made. I was supposed to be on leave for another six months to sort everything out, maybe even have a real vacation. After the funeral, after Ellie went back to school, I went ice fishing. Lake Ippawash. I was there about eight hours when I got the call. I should’ve thrown my phone in the damn fishing hole but… They needed me. Bodies piling up in North Dakota. I can never resist a case, and I thought, what the hell. It would help me to focus again. Take my mind off things. Then after North Dakota there was a case in Seattle, and another one, and then a conference in Brussels, and a consult in Toronto, and then some divers unearthed the victims of the Bay Harbor Butcher…”

He slams a folder back into its place between two others. “So it’s been about two and a half years. I wish I could say it’s good to be back.”

Deb picks up the photograph from his desk, cleaning it off with a tissue from her pocket. Frank with his family, maybe twenty years ago, when he was still older than she is now. Jeans. Plaid shirt. Blond hair a little too long for Bureau regulations, slicked back off his face. His wife beautiful, of course. Their daughter giggling and grinning for the camera in his arms. Pure happiness. But it was twenty years ago. The Morgans might’ve managed a photo like this twenty years ago too, and she knows all too well it hadn’t been sweetness and light most of the time.

“Are you going to call your daughter?” It’s none of her business. And yet…

Frank levers out the chair from behind the desk and sits down, uncovering the stack of forms Adams had mentioned. “When we’re done here. She’s probably busy.”

"Being serious and idealistic?"

"College classes. Or hanging out with some environmentalist group. Fortunately not too radical, but most protesters still get into trouble if they're devoted enough."

"Rebelling against the Man?" Deb asks, studying the map on the wall. "Or her old man?"

"Maybe. Hope not."

The flight had been quiet, and she'd watched a superhero movie while Frank went over his notes. Despite the revelry of their last night in Portland, he couldn't be anything but tense, preparing to leave his entire professional life behind, and not exactly departing in triumph either. But he'd seemed happy enough when they'd talked, let her put her head in his lap to sleep. A perfect gentleman.

Who has the weirdest travel plan she's ever seen. "What's this?"

"Case I was working." Frank's got his voice of cool evasiveness working again. "We're taking it with us."

"They won't mind you stealing their evidence?"

Frank scratches his jaw, looking at the forms. "They don't think it _is_ evidence. They don't think it's a case at all. Remember I mentioned the other killer out there who might be diabolical, might just be a figment of my imagination? That's him. Trinity."

“Trinity?” She looks closer at the multicolored strings tying city to city across the US.

“Or her, I suppose. Never got so much as a hint of the actual person.”

When she turns around, Frank is cleaning his glasses with a handkerchief, looking up at her with curiosity mixed with a certain amount of wariness. “Are you sure you want to hear this? I’ve been wrong about two killers in a row now. Why not make it three?”

“Third time lucky,” she counters, and goes to sit on the edge of his desk. “Come on. If you’re crazy I’m still stuck with you for a few days.”

Despite all of it, he still looks like he’s sizing her up before he starts. “A few years ago I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, working a case. I wound up on a murder scene that turned out to be nothing to do with our killer. Still, it stuck in my memory. A young woman, with her throat cut in a bathtub. Blood everywhere. Horrible sight. Yet there was absolutely no trace of her killer.”

“Let me guess. Then he killed two more people.”

“He’s killed a lot more than that. _If_ I’m right. I’ve told this story to a lot of people over the years, people who know me a lot better than you do, Debra. People who’d trust me with their lives. And I’ve been laughed out of every meeting.”

Deb casts a look over her shoulder at the map. “So what happened next?”

“Next I was in San Francisco about a year later. There was a glut of cases of men being beaten to death, but that isn’t such an unusual occurrence in general. Plenty of drunken brawls where someone grabs a bottle or a baseball bat. Still, one of the cases I found really didn’t match the pattern. It was of no use to my case, but I found it interesting. Then I was sitting in the airport, waiting to go home, and I picked up a newspaper. Another woman, exsanguinated in a bathtub. She’d died days ago, but the police had just released the report.”

“Can’t be that unusual, though. Two cases in two years in different states…”

“I know. But I phoned up the office in Raleigh and asked some kid there to check out some things for me. He found a very similar beating had taken place after the bathtub murder there. Same types of victims too. Young white woman. Middle-aged white man. And he sent me a stack of other cases that had just seemed a little off. I cross-checked with San Francisco, and found the third of his kills – a woman with two children who inexplicably commits suicide by jumping off a building. After that, I started looking back through the years for the pattern. Spent a lot of hours in record libraries. And I found them.”

Deb takes a breath, studying the board. She _wants_ to see this as a flash of genius, but… “You know, they’re not that strange. The bathtub, okay, but a guy being beaten outside a bar and a woman killing herself?”

“I know.” Frank sighs, already frustrated. “But it’s not just the crimes themselves, it’s the type of victims, and the fact that no trace is ever found of the killer. All of these are unsolved crimes. Cold cases.”

“Except suicides might just be suicides, and…” Deb forces herself to quit playing devil’s advocate. “Okay, let’s say you’re right. What did you find out?”

It would be really fucking nice if Frank could pull an ace out of his profiler’s hat, but he simply shrugs. “Nothing. As I said, there’s no trace of the killer at the crime scenes. He’s just as meticulous as the Bay Harbor Butcher. He always strikes in different cities, never the same place twice. Maybe one of them is home, maybe none of them is. No connections between the victims. I can’t track him down, or predict the next crime. All I know is, until this guy is dead or in prison, they’ll keep popping up… Three kills in the same city, three innocent people dead.”

“So what if you just find the first kill in the cycle? Then you know where he is.”

“Tried that. There’s still no way. Local police don’t believe me, and there’s nothing they could do if they did. Warn every woman with two kids they might be assaulted by someone, when we have no idea what he – or she – looks like? It would be chaos. Or completely ignored.”

She narrows her eyes, trying to think of a way that _would_ work, or might simply prove the existence of such a pattern. But nothing comes. “So what do you do?”

“Nothing I can do except hope the killer slips up, or hope something stops him. What I’ve been trying to do is get the Bureau to take over investigation of cases that fit the profile, but they’re really not interested. If the public doesn’t think there’s a killer, there’s no sense in me conjuring someone out of thin air.” He smiles up at her. “You’re not convinced either, are you?”

She’d really like to lie. But she leans down and kisses him instead. “Guess we’d better start packing.”

* * *

  
One suburban house is more or less like another, in a neat neighborhood full of lawns and Volvos and kids’ toys, ready to be used again when their owners return from school. They pull into the driveway in Frank’s rented car. Frank had said he’d paid a guy to come around and cut the grass, check that everything seemed to be in order, but no one’s been inside in years. Deb’s been in those sorts of places before, but usually only when there had been a body involved.

If anyone is watching them, no one says hello or demands to know what they’re doing. Frank pops the trunk. Far too little in the way of a life: a couple of bags, a few book boxes, and those charts from his office. Deb helps him carry the lot inside.

The house smells stale rather than bad, and she opens windows and blinds while trying not to look too curiously at this museum of a home: photographs on the mantelpiece, magazines left where they had been placed years ago, perhaps by a woman who would never return.

“Well, at least we haven’t been invaded by rats,” Frank says as she hears the front door shut, a note of forced levity in his voice. He dumps the last of the boxes in the living room, and looks around.

“You want me to give you a moment?” Deb asks. “I could take a walk…”

“No… no. I think it’s better that you’re here.” He slips his hands into his pockets, breathing in. "Too many ghosts. I should've come back a long time ago. But I was busy - I _wanted_ to be busy - and I couldn't ask Ellie to deal with all of this. There's just too much."

Deb wants to look closely at every picture, go through everything in an attempt to learn more about him, even if it's bad or heartbreaking. But that just seems disrespectful in a house that's become something of a museum.

On the other hand, if she doesn't, there's a good chance Frank will just stand here for hours, soaking in all the depression and lost dreams. Would she blame him? When their parents had both been gone, at least she'd had Dexter. He'd been numb while she'd been distraught, but at least Dexter's always been able to get things done, however bad she guessed he must be feeling inside. Frank had only had a daughter he'd felt he had to protect at any cost.

"So," she says. It feels like no one's spoken for hours. "What do you want to do? We could take an inventory. See what you want to keep, what your daughter might want... Maybe I should go buy more boxes."

When she'd met him and started to get to know him, she'd thought he was truly unshakable, with that eerie calmness of his. As time goes on it's almost reassuring to know he has his moments of self-doubt as much as she does. With him, there's just less yelling.

"Ever think of getting married?" he asks, and she's about to grin and laughingly ask if he's proposing when he takes down a photo from the mantelpiece, blowing away dust. "I was about your age. Totally unprepared. But it was the best thing I ever did."

He's lost in a world of memories now, and it's not really for her, but she looks anyway. The Frank of thirty years ago, all blond hair and cheekbones in his dress uniform. Just a kid, really.

She wonders if they'd like each other.

"I think we should get a hotel room," Frank says, carefully setting the photograph back in place. "I can't do this now."

When they get to the hotel, Deb lets him hog the shower and, she imagines, most of the hot water from the block, while she flicks through about 250 cable channels. None of them seem to be announcing any serial killers, riots, or nuclear explosions in downtown Miami. Maybe she should call Dexter. But none of the subjects on her mind are really Dex's area of expertise.

It takes longer than it should for it to occur to her that something might be wrong. Frank's just lost his job and revisited all the old pain of losing his wife… But he's _Frank_ …

She raps on the door anyway, calls his name, and opens it before he can answer.

"Hey." He's not lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood. Just shaving, looking into a fogged-up mirror, white towel tied around his waist. "Sorry. Did you want to use the bathroom?"

"No. Fuck. Worried about you." The one benefit of being exactly the way she is, is that no one is ever, _ever_ unaware when she's upset.

"You shouldn't be." Frank washes off the last of the foam from his face, smoothing a hand experimentally along his jawline. "I knew this was coming, Debra. The job, having to deal with the house... I'll just need a little space to figure everything out, and I think the best thing would be for you to go back to Miami."

She blinks. Seriously? This shit again? "Are you breaking up with me?"

With anyone else she would get an instantaneous "what? no!" or a "yes, I'm sorry it had to happen this way". With Frank she just gets that _look_ , torn between what he wants and what he thinks might be right. "Deb…"

"I'm not going to draw fucking _thought bubbles_ for you anymore, Frank. Tell me what you want!"

He looks at the floor, no pockets to shove his hands into, and then meets her eyes. "All right," he says, reaching for her with wet fingers. "Get your diary. We'll figure it out."

Somewhere between anger and relief they tumble into bed together, his skin and hair damp on dry sheets, VH-1 humming along in the background. No more hedging, no more guesses about what might be the right thing. For the first time since Portland she can look in his eyes and find him there, kissing her and laughing and actually present.

Afterward, he calls the airline while she showers. When she comes back he's flat out on the bed with his laptop, her diary, and a red pen.

"You seriously want me to go now."

"I know it wasn't much of a vacation, but I promise I'll make it up to you." He pokes the pen at a page. "It depends on your workload of course."

Deb pulls on a clean shirt and sits down, examining the pages. "And we're going to do this for _how_ long?"

"Not sure. It might be a while."

"To do some paperwork? You can just get a real estate agent to deal with the house…" It's a losing argument, but she has to make it.

"Debra." He sits up, taking her hands between his. "I'll come to Miami. But when I do, I want to be sure that I can stay, that I'm not going to be rushing back here every weekend. And that you're not going to want me to."

"I could never want you to." Sure, there probably won't be much clubbing, but doesn't she get enough of an adrenaline rush at work?

"Even if I've been wrong about three killers?"

She gives his hand a squeeze. "Here's a secret. I don't want to keep you around just to catch serial killers for me."

"It's my cooking isn't it?"

"Okay, gotta admit that's part of it. But you promise me you won't just run off. And no fucking moping. You're too goddamn amazing for moping."

"Yes ma'am."

It's a while till her flight leaves, so they lie on the bed together watching TV, limbs tangled together. She could never have believed just how reassuring it could be to listen to a man's heartbeat. Steady. Constant.

She closes her eyes and lets herself drift off in his arms.

* * *

 _Three killers_ , she thinks when Frank kisses her goodbye at the door to his room. He's got a dinner date with his daughter and she's not going to make him hang around the airport with her, especially not if this is just a goodbye for now, when they'll see each other soon enough. She thumbs through her diary in the elevator, searching for the red circles and Frank's neat handwriting. It'll be a few more weeks than she'd like, but she's at least reasonably confident he'll live up to his promises.

But three killers…

The easiest thing would be to accept that he's losing at least some of the talent he once had for profiling and catching serial killers. Does it matter? It's not his job anymore, and it's precisely the fact that he's shortly going to be unemployed that makes it possible for them to be together. Could she really have liked it, giving up Miami Metro to dash around the country with him? The excitement is always there, but so is the tension, the danger. Frank loves his job as much as she loves hers, but he'd missed out on so much she doesn't want to lose, even if her life isn't likely to have kids in it anytime soon.

Fuck it. She'll try it his way and prove him wrong about her ever getting bored with him, even if the most exciting he ever does is catch fish. He's still the same guy who convinced her to get over her fears, who coaxed her out of her safe zone with nothing more than charm and cucumber sandwiches.

The elevator doors open and she looks up as the other passengers step out, picking up her bag. She's just another tourist in DC, police badge folded over in her back pocket, gun in a locker in Miami. It's strangely liberating to just breathe, mingling with the other people as she strolls through the lobby: parents trying to wrangle children, maintenance men carrying tools and rope, far too many men in suits who could probably be Bureau agents...

She fingers the cellphone in her pocket, thinking of calling Frank to tell him she misses him already, to try and work something out that doesn't involve not seeing him for weeks.

 _Breathe_.

There's a taxi rank outside the hotel, and she waits, hand around her phone, something niggling in the back of her mind. She tries to push it away – this isn't the time to be needy – as a cab driver calls out to her: "Where to?"

"Airport." She opens the door to throw in her bag, and…

 _Rope_. Not ordinary workman's rope, either, even though she's looked at that precise type so many times in recent days that it seemed ordinary at first glance.

She looks back over her shoulder, and the man she had taken for a maintenance worker is nowhere to be seen. Probably nothing. If a prison in Portland uses it, it must be used by places all over.

But. If she were a killer. A killer like Rudy, like the Butcher, like Kravitz and Trinity… Driven to it by a creed beyond understanding, with only one man truly believing that she even existed…

"Are we going or what?" The driver raises his eyebrows, impatient.

Once she'd been indecisive and almost lost everything. Now Deb grabs her bag and runs, opting for the elevator rather than wearing herself out tearing up nine flights, except that means she has no reception for her cellphone. "Jesus fuck fuck _fuck_." And no plan either, unless it involves throwing herself in front of a bullet.

All her frantic thoughts stop dead as the doors open just fast enough for her to hear the gunshot. And then another. All along the corridor, there's complete silence before a few doors open - the other occupants are probably very sensibly taking cover. Debra jacks her badge out of her pocket and runs, skidding to a halt as she sees the body of a man in the doorway of Frank's room, as well as Frank, half-dressed, gun in his hand, kneeling next to the body with blood spattered on his undershirt.

"You'd better call 911," he says, as though this is nothing. But then he looks up at her, really looks, and for once she can see beyond the professional façade to the fear mingled with sheer relief. "Maybe I'm not losing it after all."

Their room is taken over by local cops in about five minutes, swiftly followed by Frank's friends from the Bureau. Practically everything not nailed down is bagged.

She and Frank wait in another room to be questioned and released. "I thought he'd get the jump on you," Deb murmurs. "I wasn't even convinced he was _real_."

"Well, I was," Frank tells her. "Also, I used to be a spy."

She nudges him in the ribs as the lead FBI investigator reports back. The dead man has been identified through his driver's license as Leo Robbins, an Oregon native who had traveled to DC the previous evening. Nothing has been finalized, but from their phone calls with the Portland office it seems as though he and Kravitz had been very close in prison, and his description might match those given by witnesses from the crime scene areas.

For Frank's part, the door had been clearly busted open, Kravitz in possession of an illegal firearm and some very familiar-looking rope. They take Frank's gun away for analysis, but there’s no suggestion of suspicion falling on him.

"Nice shooting, Lundy," the investigator remarks with a sigh. "Just try to do it on someone else's turf next time."

It's only after two hours of waiting that they're allowed to leave. Frank doesn't seem half as shaky and traumatized as she would be, but she puts an arm around him anyway as they walk to the elevator, and he leans his head against hers. He doesn't need to say a word.

"Dad?"

The doors of the second elevator have opened, revealing a khaki-clad young woman whose eyes widen at the crime scene tape. It's then that she sees Frank with blood over him, and Deb can't be certain whether it's relief or concern that makes her tackle him so hard.

Deb takes her arm away, feeling as though she should just slip off quietly and leave them to their reconciliation.

"I'm okay… Why did they let you up here?"

"What? I'm going to stay in the lobby when they won't even tell me if you're okay? You didn't show up at the restaurant..."

"I sent you a text message." For all the Lundy family squabbling, he's still hugging her as tight as can be. "I'm fine, Ellie."

"Mom would totally kill you," she mutters, and Frank laughs.

"She would, I'll bet. Sweetheart, this is Debra."

Deb puts a hand up to wave.

"Oh, hey." Frank's daughter loosens her grip on him and smoothes down her jacket, adjusting her backpack on her shoulder and presumably trying to think of the correct post-shooting protocol. "Um. You want to grab some dinner? I'll bet Jon has a t-shirt you could use..."

It should be truly, truly awful, having dinner with her much older boyfriend's daughter, and Ellie's boyfriend Jon, who does indeed have dreadlocks and a distinct herbal smell to him, as well as an entire collection of completely unironic Che Guevara t-shirts (Frank wears one without any comment). But they avoid the subject of the shooting, or serial killers in general, while they dig into pasta, and if Ellie or Jon finds the age difference between her and Frank a little odd, no one mentions anything.

"You know I don't care," she whispers with a smile as they walk back to the hotel, where hopefully they now have a new room and possibly an armed guard. "I want to be with you."

Frank leans over to kiss her temple. "Maybe you should stay after all. Stop me shooting myself in the foot."

"You're doing just fine." Now that there's an option, it's not so tempting. "I don't know if Miami can do without me."

Her ticket is rearranged for the next afternoon, when Frank comes to the airport with her and is dutifully bored until she decides to forget all the security and other passengers and just make out with her boyfriend, hands clasped behind his neck while they kiss.

"I should've known," he tells her. "If it was you… I'd have gone anywhere to protect you. It wasn't just self-preservation for Robbins, not when it comes to trying to shoot a federal agent in a crowded hotel. It was revenge, for taking his partner away."

Deb grins. "Oh, we are going to have _so_ much sex the first time one of your red circles comes around, baby."

"I'm counting on it."

She leaves to wave tickets and passports and police badges in the faces of numerous TSA officials, resolving not to look back. But she does, of course, and he's still there. Frank Lundy, Special Agent Rockstar, smiling just to see her.

* * *

  
 **4\. Miami**

Life goes on. A committed relationship that's mainly relegated to emails and notes on her desktop calendar doesn't change Deb's daily life so very much. In Miami the sun still beats down on beaches and sidewalks alike, and murders still roll into homicide like clockwork every morning. They have a new detective, Joey Quinn, to replace Doakes by the time she gets back into the office. He's nothing like Doakes and nothing like Frank, so she assumes that must be a happy medium and decides to put up with his stupid jokes.

She tries to avoid dragging Frank into her cases. He might appreciate being asked, but the whole of Miami Metro knows she's dating an FBI agent, and she'll never make detective if anyone thinks she's being fed all the answers. Besides, he always did seem concerned that their relationship was based purely on the excitement of tracking down serial killers. Instead they just email and talk about... stuff. The real estate market. Travel. How she might conceivably bake a cake without needing to call the fire department. It's not heart-racing, adrenaline-pumping stuff, but it's... nice.

"When are you going to fucking just _come_ here?" she demands almost every night, phone to her ear as she microwaves noodles or pizza or whatever and he tells her about some gourmet miracle he's whipping up.

She can almost see him smile. "Check your calendar."

Life goes on. She catches the Skinner, Miami's first serial killer since the Butcher, and makes detective with the help of a pot-smoking musician who drives her crazy. She never quite figures out if his insults are some kind of flirting or just actual insults. She doesn't care. Dexter gets married - fucking actually _married_. He and Rita invite Frank, but he predictably can't make it, sending some elaborate kitchen... _thing_ Rita seems to be absolutely delighted with. Deb and Dexter spend five minutes poking at it, decide it must be a torture device, and leave it alone.

Frank sends her a Christmas card, all sparkly glitter and shit, and an airline ticket falls out. She has Christmas dinner with Dex and Rita and the kids, but for New Year she's in a wooden cottage in the middle of fucking nowhere in Buttfuck, Canada. Snow crackles under her feet as Frank wraps his arms around her and they watch the stars.

"What the fuck have you been doing all year?" she demands, huddled under about four layers of blankets and waiting for Frank to get his ass in bed.

"Paperwork, mostly."

She'd swear he has icewater for blood, lazily stripping off his sweater and hopping out of his jeans before wandering over, naked, to check that the door is indeed locked. Presumably in case any particularly hardy serial killers (or bears) have trekked through the wilderness on New Year's Eve to find them.

"That better be one fucking mountain of paperwork."

"You'd be impressed."

He switches off the light and slips into bed beside her, strangely warm to the touch as she snuggles up to him, thumb brushing his lips as she cups his jaw and moves in to kiss him. Slow and deep, giving him a chance to breathe. He better be fucking proud of how patient she's being.

"I just want to make sure…" She can see that intense, earnest stare of his, even in the dark. "That when I come to Miami, I can come to stay."

Part of it she understands: business to wrap up on the east coast, officially retiring from the FBI and wrapping up outstanding paperwork, selling his house and going through all of his wife's belongings, spending time with his daughter… She'd just never expected it could take anywhere near this long.

So part of it has to be him proving to her that long-distance relationships can be made to work, teaching her how to wait, and maybe testing whether her workplace crush on her superior, mentor, and friend can survive weeks and miles apart.

Fuck him. If it wasn't going to last she'd never have called him and stopped him leaving Miami in the first place. Besides, he should know better than to challenge Debra Morgan to _anything_.

Vice had made her get used to a lot of late nights. Homicide is all about the early mornings, stumbling bleary-eyed into crime scenes where, if she's lucky, Quinn or Batista has already done a coffee run. The only benefit of being permanently sleep-deprived is that the horror of the scenes rarely penetrates. Today, though...

"Holy fuck."

She's standing in the doorway, all too aware of Quinn behind her, bopping around to see over her shoulder.

"That's a lot of blood," he says.

"Most of it's water," Dex points out helpfully. "Can I just… thanks."

Deb lets him past into the bathroom, which was probably more than comfortable for the inhabitants of the apartment, but is woefully inadequate for setting up a forensic investigation. "Holy _fuck_ ," she says again.

"You knew her?" Quinn hazards. He doesn't seem very concerned.

"I have to make a phone call."

Out in the corridor she goes over all the facts the first officer on the scene had rattled off and tries to put them in some kind of perspective. Lisa Bell, young woman, no kids. No murder weapon in evidence, no witnesses. They'll have to wait for DNA or fingerprints, but nothing obvious... Just a whole fuckload of blood.

She hits Frank's number on speed dial.

"Lundy." He absolutely never checks to see who it is before answering.

"You need to come to Miami right the fuck now."

"Is this a booty call, Detective Morgan?" There's background noise. Clanking dishes. At least he wasn't asleep.

She watches the trail of forensics guys in and out of the apartment, studies the faces of curious neighbors. "Where are you?" He seems to live in airports these days.

"Colorado."

" _Colorado_?"

"Mm. Psychology conference that's inexplicably but quite delightfully combined with skiing."

Skiing? What the… She pushes hair back of her face with an angry sweep. "I'm at a crime scene. Girl in a bathtub."

The resulting moment of silence is exactly what she'd hoped for. "Tell me more."

"Throat slit. Bled out. Not a fucking shred of evidence so far, but we seriously just got here. I… I have to get canvassing the neighbors." Beat. "You think it could be him?"

Another pause. "I'm going to call the airlines, get out of here first chance I get. I'll email you..."

"Right. Right. Okay. _Fuck_."

"Debra." The laughter in his voice is all too evident. "I'll see you tonight. Try to do some shopping."

Just for that, she's going to fill the fridge with yogurt.

* * *

The last time she was in the airport, she was returning to normality, going back to her regular job and regular apartment. They haven't even had a serial killer case since, despite the fact that several of their 'regular' murder cases can be real bafflers too. But now he's here again, in Miami, on the track of a killer. Good times.

His flight gets in just before midnight, after she's spent forty-five minutes hanging around Arrivals flipping through every murder mystery in the bookstore and going over all the case notes in her head. Not much to go on yet, and Frank will probably use the very absence of evidence as his evidence. That's always been the problem with Trinity, he's admitted, but he'd been right about Kravitz and Robbins, and more harm could be done in not listening to him than in indulging him too much.

Besides. He's her boyfriend, and he's back in Miami, lifting her up off her feet on the main concourse and kissing her as though they haven't seen each other in... Well, in months. In all her frantic thoughts about the case she'd somehow forgotten how good he fucking _smells_.

"Want you inside me right the fuck _now_ ," she whispers by his ear, and Frank breaks out in laughter, setting her back on her feet and taking her hand in his.

"I missed you," he says. "I see the city's still standing."

"Barely."

At baggage claim, he puts an arm around her and listens while she recounts the details of the case. She would have brought photos, except LaGuerta might not approve of her showing off murder victims in the airport.

"So what do you think?"

Frank shrugs and reaches to haul his case off the conveyor belt. "Sounds like Trinity, but unfortunately I can't be sure - really sure - until the other two victims show up. By which time it's far too late."

"But if _one_ more, at least…"

"It would help, but that's still another person dead, and we're no closer to finding him. Just a little closer to maybe convincing someone Trinity exists. I'm not even sure I've convinced you yet."

"Doesn't matter," she says, watching him go to grab a couple of large pinboards bound in canvas. "I still have to investigate the Lisa Bell case like it's any other murder, and if it's exactly like any number of other murders all over the country, I have to... Did you seriously bring those on the plane with you?"

"Baggage handlers hate me," Frank replies cheerfully, picking up all of his various belongings. "I hope you brought your car."

In her apartment, she orders pizza while he stashes his clothes in a drawer she’s cleared out for him, and props up his murder boards on the kitchenette counter, jabbing in another pin for Miami.

"So what do we do?" she asks, settling down on his lap on the couch and deciding not to think too much about how badly they're going to freak out the delivery guy.

"Investigate." His mouth feels so fucking good right there at her throat. "He's been doing this for twenty years. No one's smart and consistent and _lucky_ enough to go forever without leaving a trace."

Twenty years. Someone like Rudy, or the Butcher, killing people across the US with no one even coming close… She's about to point out that even if he ever does slip up, it might not be now, might not be with them even knowing it's him. But Frank is looking around, glimmer of a smile on his lips.

"You know, Morgan, we really need to find a bigger apartment."

Her eyes narrow, ready to hit him in the ear for messing with her. "You're here to stay?"

"I said I would be. This altered my schedule a bit, but… I don't want to be at another airport with you if we're not leaving together."

"You say the sweetest fucking things."

"It's a gift."

And so life goes on with Frank in it, much more than dates in a diary and a voice on the phone as they do their best to investigate the case. But it also means having someone care about when – or if – she goes to bed, and making breakfast for her in the morning, with real estate ads circled in newspapers.

Once she'd have thought domesticity was every bit as frightening as Trinity, but Frank is teaching her to love it.

* * *

"Motherfucking _fuck_!"

She's been saying more or less the same thing all day, ever since Frank went out to buy milk and came back with a morning paper prominently featuring his photograph. Having a close connection to a reporter can be a bonus in the police department, but not when it's all one way, and definitely not when Quinn's girlfriend is putting their entire case in jeopardy.

Everything had started off so promisingly with Dexter and Masuka unearthing an old case showing that a young woman had been murdered in exactly the same way, in the same location, thirty years ago.

“Something new,” Frank had said, making careful notes on his chart, but none of them had been able to tell if it was good or bad for his theory, or for their chances of catching the murderer.

The man who had been prosecuted and convicted thirty years ago for the crime had seemed like a good bet, except one look at him had told them he was not only incapable of the precision required today, but probably thirty years ago too.

And then a woman had thrown herself from a warehouse, and Frank’s pattern seemed to be accurate again. Married. Two kids.

“I should’ve been able to stop all of this a long time ago,” he’d said, watching over her body in the morgue. “So many people…”

So many people. At least this change in the pattern, the matching cases from thirty years ago, had given them an idea. If they could find out where the third kill – a man bludgeoned to death outside a bar – had happened in the 70s, perhaps they could stake it out in the present and catch Trinity in the act. A once in a lifetime opportunity.

She'd been able to raid the files and go through a stack of them on the floor of Dexter's lab before LaGuerta found them. Having Frank thrown out was no surprise – the frequency with which he'd had to call her on her shit during the Butcher case had meant no love lost between them – but at least she hadn't made a scene.

The problem now, of course, is they have a viable pattern of murders, matched between the present day and thirty years ago, and absolutely no backup. Which leads to the swearing.

"He's just one man," Frank points out as they stroll along by the beach, breeze in the night air.

"No partner this time?"

"No… this one's most definitely a loner. Drifts in, drifts out. Nowhere to call home." He gives her a squeeze. "But I'd have said the same about me before I met you."

"You know it. I attract crazies." She rests her head on his shoulder as they walk. "Maybe we can just go ourselves. Ask Batista and maybe Dex to help out, cover the exits. But still. Mother _fucker_."

"Mother _fucker_ ," he agrees solemnly, and that can't help but make her laugh.

Conversation about killers aside, they could almost be a normal couple now, walking on the edge of the ocean, comfortable in each other's presence. Just a girl and her boy... And screw the age difference. They've both been through too much, hated being apart too much, to care about a few (dozen) years. She could easily be killed in the line of duty before she hits forty...

She's still thinking over statistics on cop deaths when she sees it and, in the context of those thoughts, it seems perfectly fine. A silhouette up ahead and off to the left, half hidden behind a telephone pole. She can't see a face, but she can see the gun, and it's the feeling of Frank tensing under her arm that jerks her out of it.

This isn't some hypothetical. This is reality.

The gun goes off, and Frank says "Debra…", and everything smashes together as she twists away from him, grabbing her gun from her belt and hoping she isn't hit. She yells a torrent of curses, with "police!" and "freeze!" in there somewhere, as if the shooter really cares, and as if she's not going to take down this fucker first chance she gets.

Stupid stupid _stupid_. Robbins had tried to kill Frank, the man who had taken down his partner and the only person in the world who firmly believed he existed. The situation is exactly the same with Trinity. Take Frank out of the equation, and maybe Deb too, and who would ever take the time to look at all of those charts and follow up on a dead man's hunches? She should've figured this out a long time ago. Should never even have been here.

The shooter makes a break for it, turning to shoot, and Deb fires while running, knowing her aim is going to be shit, wishing she'd spent more time at the range, wishing trained-killer Frank was the one with the gun.

 _Frank… Jesus…_

The shooter goes down so fast Debra stops dead, suspicious that he might be faking… But there's no movement as she approaches, kicking the gun out of his… no, _her_ hand. "Fuck." It's Quinn's girlfriend, the reporter, now whimpering on the ground, blood dark on the pavement.

"Call 911!" She yells at the nearest bystander, and it's then that the absence of footsteps behind her truly fills her with dread as she pulls her cellphone from her pocket and runs back to where she'd left Frank.

His eyes are open, and he actually has the fucking nerve to _smile_ at her as she kneels down beside him, even though he's as white as the ice at Lake Ippawash. The right side of his shirt is stained red between his fingers as he puts pressure on the wound. "Hey."

"Jesus…" She can't fucking lose him. Not like this. Not any way.

When the operator comes on the line she tells him her badge number and gives him instructions she's said twenty times before, but now her heart is thumping in her chest and everything she's ever learned about gunshot wounds has gone completely out of her head.

"It's all right," Frank says, because of course he'd be Zen at a time like this, even if his voice is faint and she doesn't really want to pay attention to the way he's not quite focusing on her. "Debra..."

"Maybe you shouldn't talk."

He winces. "Didn't survive Vietnam, the Cold War, and the Bureau to die on a fucking beach. Did you get him?"

"Her," she tells him, pressing her hand to his against the wound. If Frank's swearing it must be bad. "The reporter. Way too young to be Trinity but I have no fucking idea why she'd…" And she shouldn't be talking about this now. Not with Frank's blood leaking out over her hand. " _Fuck_. Ambulance is on the way. Probably took the fucking scenic route."

"Deb. Hey. Listen to me." He really does look older now, pale and drawn. "Listen. If anything… If I don't… You have to know that I love you."

"Frank-" This sounds horribly like a deathbed confession, and there's no way she can let him tempt fate like that.

"Look out for my daughter. She's just a kid, really. Not like you. And..." He blinks as if he can't quite clear his vision. "Dexter. Be careful."

It's the fact that he's making no sense that troubles her most. "Dexter?"

But her question is drowned out by sirens, and when she looks back, Frank's eyes are closed, hand limp under hers.

* * *

The Debra of two years ago would have taken a gun and a baseball bat and, failing that, her bare fists, to everything in the city. Quinn especially would be a bloody pulp, even though he had been just as shocked, surprised, and utterly confused as anyone else that Christine Hill had turned out to be a deranged killer.

The Debra of today had just sat in the hallway of the hospital with Dexter and Angel, and tried to think of how well she was holding everything together until Dexter whispered "you're shaking", and she realized she was crying into his shirt.

The one benefit of Frank being shot is that people start to take the Trinity case seriously, if only to try and make some sense of the shooting. The next night Angel and a team have the office building staked out, looking for a man matching the description Frank had given her.

"There's no way he'll show," Angel had pointed out. "He must know we're onto him."

"He has to show," Dexter had said before she could clear her throat and draw a breath and say exactly the same thing. "It's who he is. He has to do it. Moth to a flame."

And the morning after that, she's snuggled up on a hospital bed while nurses look at her disapprovingly and Frank takes every opportunity to bitch about jello. Trust him to survive a gunshot wound, major blood loss, and a coma, only to start whining about the food.

"There'll be an inquiry," he says. It's not even a question.

"Not much of one. It was suicide by cop. No way he was going to let them take him."

"And what were they even going to charge him with?"

"Anything." They'd discussed it beforehand. "Material witness warrant for Lisa Bell if they had to. Angel knows a judge."

Frank smoothes back hair from her cheek, IV needle in the back of his hand. "You have wonderful friends, Debra."

"Yeah, well. You're good people. Anyway, they could've got him on breaking and entering, assault, attempted murder by the time they were through. It's not dozens of murders, but… It's still over."

"Mm. What was his name?"

"Arthur Mitchell." It really doesn't sound as impressive as she was hoping. "He was married. Happily, apparently. Two kids. Active in his church and some Christian organization that goes around the country building houses. I haven’t got all the details yet, but I’ll bet at least some of the locations match up to your cities."

"Oh," Frank says, a vague smile on his lips. "It was that simple all along."

"It's always simple when you know the secret."

She shifts on the bed so she can look at him. "You were right about both of them. The killer in Portland and Trinity. Sounds like your gut instincts are still pretty good."

"I don't know about that." Right now his actual gut is pretty black and blue, with an impressive array of stitches at his side. "Never thought he could be a family man. Never thought he even had a home."

"So what about the Butcher?” Maybe another case, the last of his three ghosts, is the thing to cheer him up and take his mind off his injury. “You know Doakes doesn't fit the profile."

Frank looks at her steadily. "I'm retired, Debra. I don't think there's any need to start unearthing that case again."

She would push the issue, but at least there are no more bodies being discovered at sea. And the Butcher never had killed indiscriminately. If they had to pick one of Frank's illusory killers to leave alone, she guesses she would choose him. She has blood on her hands too now, after killing Christine. There's no way she would take that bullet back, and Christine hadn't even been a murderer.

"You need to go home," Frank says. "Pick me up some clothes and bust me out of here. I can lie around being bored in your bed too, but at least I'll have some decent cooking."

"You'll have some decent toast, you mean." But she gets up anyway, giving him a kiss. "Hey, do you remember what you said before the ambulance? You said-"

"I love you."

She can actually feel the pink coming to her cheeks. "Uh huh. But something about Dexter?"

He looks blank. "I don't know. Brain misfiring. Or maybe I just wanted him to get a good look at my blood all over the sidewalk."

"Huh. Yeah, maybe. Well, see you later, gorgeous."

It only occurs to her to say "I love you too" when she's all the way down the corridor, thumbing the elevator call button.

She takes a breath, thinks for just a second, and runs all the way back to tell him.

* * *

By the time Thanksgiving comes around, all is blissfully quiet in the world of Miami Metro. Once she'd have hated it, but she's been busy enough running around the city looking at apartments with Frank to be glad for a respite in between horrific murder scenes. Her paperwork is all complete for the first time in years.

"This is all too fucking good to be true," she says, clinking beer bottles with Dex in his backyard. It's a lovely day, kids in the neighborhood tearing around with water pistols, and both of their significant others having some sort of culinary orgasm in the kitchen. "Seriously, what did we ever do to deserve them? Nicest fucking people in the universe."

Dexter shrugs and takes a drink. "Maybe we're not too bad."

"You're not. Mr. Goody-fucking-two-shoes, apart from that whole Lila thing. Wife, kids, suburbia…"

"What about you? You've got a place. And you've got Lundy. Doesn't he have a kid?"

"Yeah, but she's almost my age."

Dex considers this. "So you should have babies. Lots of babies."

She picks up Cody's water pistol and brandishes it at him. "Fuck you."

"Fuck me?"

"You just never want me to sleep again."

It is nice to have someone to bring to these family events, though, and of course Frank fits in perfectly, showing Cody his scar (to a delighted response of "eww!"), charming Aster, and volunteering to help Rita in the kitchen. Frank fits in perfectly everywhere, really: her oasis of calm in a crazy world. Occasionally he still gets cryptic phone calls and emails from the Bureau, requesting his assistance, but he never even suggests running off after a case.

"I'll leave that to younger men," he says, and most of the time Deb believes him.

He's writing another book that he lets her read chapter by chapter. It's fiction, he says, but she can see more of him in it than she'd ever found in his factual textbooks. Maybe that’s one way to get around both painful memories and the Official Secrets Act in one fell swoop. Some days he goes fishing with Dexter on his boat. God knows what they find to talk about.

Mostly, though, he's with her, humming while he cooks elaborate meals she never thinks she's going to be able to finish, jogging alongside her soaked with sweat on Miami streets, soaping up her back in the shower in what's inevitably the prelude to hot, desperate lovemaking against whatever surface they can find. After he'd almost died, not once but twice, right before her eyes, she's forgotten any fear she had about the pills he has to take, plaque in his arteries, new wrinkles every year. There's too much to love instead.

"Would you ever get married again?" she asks one morning, her day off. Just like every week, she’d had serious plans for the day involving laundry and a haircut and buying some new socks. But, just like every week, she’d forgotten it all the instant she’d woken up in sunlight, finding him watching her.

Now, after long, sleepy, wonderful sex, the air conditioner's on full blast and she still feels hot with barely a sheet across her, Frank's fingers playing over her stomach.

Frank leans in to kiss between her breasts. "Is that a proposal, Detective Morgan?"

"Fuck. I don't know. Rita was asking me. How about you just answer the question, retired Special Agent Lundy?"

"I think it would depend on the person."

"No shit. How many people are you living with, exactly?"

Frank continues to plant kisses down her sternum, determinedly not looking her in the eye. "Well. I _have_ thought about it. And I think I would. If the lady in question were to ask."

"You want _me_ to ask?" He's the one whose wife passed away, who should have giant unspoken issues about the whole thing. "Wait. You want to marry me? Seriously?" This is just too strange a conversation for a Sunday morning. She's barely even awake.

"Mm." He sets his cheek against her stomach and looks up at her as she reaches to stroke his hair. Fucking puppy dog eyes. "If you were to ask."

Holy fucking fuck. The whole thing had just been a casual question from Rita, because of course married people with babies think _everyone_ should be married with babies. But while she can’t see any kids in their future, the idea of making a formal commitment doesn’t strike her with as much shock and disgust as she’d thought it really should, seeing as the last time she’d been engaged was to a genuine sociopathic killer.

Frank is still looking at her. She should probably say something. Anything. Like, for instance, "what's for breakfast?" Nothing comes.

"Just something to think about," Frank says after a moment, and rubs his eyes, getting up and stretching. "I'm going for a swim. Coming?"

"Maybe later."

Her cellphone rings while she’s making coffee: Angel calling from a crime scene, quickly apologizing for calling on her day off, but suggesting that she switch around her calendar. She stands at the window while Angel explains, watching Frank swim lengths underwater, and once Angel hangs up she pulls on clothes before going outside to yell for Frank when he surfaces.

"What is it?" he asks, toweling his hair dry as he walks up the stairs barefoot.

"You have no fucking idea. Girls in barrels, covered in formaldehyde. Jesus, why does this always happen in Miami?"

Frank processes it all. Super spy or not, he’s never very good at hiding how excited he gets by new cases to solve. "You need to go?"

"You want in?"

"In?"

"Yeah, in. If we have another serial killer on the loose I know we could use your expertise." Fuck appearances. If she never gets another promotion it'll be worth it if she saves a life through a quick solve.

She can _see_ the temptation in his eyes, the desire to just throw on some clothes and _go_. But he smiles instead. "Fill me in later, Detective. I'm sure you can handle it. Besides, your colleagues really hate my hat."

"It's a fucking awesome hat," she says, and kisses him. "I'll call you."

"I'll be here."

She’s at the stairs before a question occurs to her. "Do I have to get you a ring?"

He stops rubbing his hair, an eye poking out from under the towel. "A what?"

"A ring. If you want me to propose."

"You have to make me toast," he says, as if it’s obvious. "Been waiting _years_ for this famous Morgan toast, and I…"

If she lets him finish she’ll never make it to the crime scene, so she just jangles her keys and hurries off to her car.

That night, later than she’d hoped, they do have toast. She hasn’t used the toaster in a while, and the dial must’ve been turned sometime in her many apartment changes in the last couple of years, so she even manages to fuck _that_ up, and she’s in the midst of babbling apologies about burned edges and whether she should cut them off or start again when Frank pushes a wine glass into her hand.

“C’mon, Morgan. Let’s celebrate.”

She looks at the glass. Only they could have toast and wine and call it dinner. “So… what? We’re actually getting married? You’re fucking _committing_ to something? You’re not going to dance around the issue and tell me you’re too old and…”

“Morgan,” Frank says with a disapproving look and just a hint of a smile. “Are you always going to be this touchy about the age thing?”

“ _Fuck_ ,” she says, laughing, and clinks her glass against his. _Marriage_. Jesus. They’ll probably just do it at the courthouse, nothing special, absolutely no requirement to wear some frou-frou dress, but… “Shit, I forgot. Brought copies of the file to show you. The barrel girls. Bet you’ve never seen anything like this before…”

Frank picks up a slice of semi-burned toast, puts on his glasses, and settles down on the couch while she spreads out photographs on the coffee table. Young women, white as ghosts, all chosen and killed and preserved by someone who is still out there, someone she has absolutely no doubt they’ll catch.

Debra sits down and watches Frank lean forward, sifting through photographs, the fire of curiosity burning in his eyes once more.

Fuck it’s good to do this again. Chasing killers, kicking ass and taking names.

They’re just as bad as each other, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.


End file.
